Lost Garden

Testosterone and Competitive Play

2009-11-03T18:43:00.008-07:00

Lately I've been digging into research on testosterone. Over the past decade, scientists have been placing players in competitive situations and then measuring how their testosterone fluctuations predict future behavior. What you find from looking at the studies is that both winners and losers will leave your game if they are placed in a set of predictable situations involving dominance, luck, and friendship.

There are four points that have experimental support:

How playing with friends affects the testosterone in winning and losing players
How playing with strangers affects the testosterone in winning in losing players
How perception of the role of luck or skill in the outcome affects the testosterone of players.
How players differ by pro-social or pro-dominance inclination.

1. How playing with strangers affects the testosterone in winners and losers
When strangers play a competitive game based off skill, the results fit the common sense understanding of winning and losing.

Winner testosterone increases. Dominance and/or aggressive behavior increases. Dominance is defined as behaviors that are intended to "gain or maintain high status" (ref) Physical energy increases (and in some cases men become aroused.) Winning is exciting.
Loser testosterone decreases. The losing player attempts to avoid fighting the same opponent, even in situations challenges unrelated.

This is the classic description of winners and losers in a competitive game. The winners get a huge rush from beating the strangers and the losers are sent home with their tail between their legs, humiliated and subdued.

The upside
Beating strangers is a guaranteed source of entertainment. If you want a highly reliable, inexpensive means of making your game fun, toss some strangers together in a game of skill (it barely matters what sort). To boost the emotion even further, place the winners on a high status pedestal. Voila, instant fun, at least for the winners.

Typically designers look for 'fun' in a game and then build the game around what we find. The hard fun or fiero is easily detectable on the faces of the victors and acts as a clarion signal of fun. This overt signal has driven designers to create hundreds of competitive games between strangers. "Hark! Here be fun!" and we flock like moths to the flame. Our fun finding, hill climbing algorithm is predisposed to overemphasize competitive play due to the strength of the delight exhibited by winners.

The downside
Yet there are clear tradeoffs that occur when we go down this design path. Losers leave. First, they know that they cannot gain status by pursuing the game, especially against the winning players. Second, if there is some way for winners to communicate, losers are subjected to degrading displays of status. Losers may react in turn with defensive behaviors if they feel they cannot escape. Especially in games where only a few people can be winners, your player retention will suffer.

The result is an intriguing purification of the community. Only the elite winners stay around. This elite community creates an even more competitive environment that in turn creates and drives out more losers. New players attempting to enter into the community are inevitably of low skill compared to the hardened veterans and are immediately classified as losers. They also leave. Competitive games slowly boil their community down to an elitist core that actively resists and inhibits audience growth.

2. How perception of the role of luck or skill in the outcome affects players
Notice that the above case applied only to games where the loser felt that they were participating in a game of skill. The testosterone response changes when players feel they are playing in a game of luck.

Winner testosterone does not increase: Winners feel that their victory was not a true demonstration of superiority.
Loser testosterone does not decrease: Losers feel like they still have a chance of winning.

Luck is another name for an unexpected environmental factors outside the control of the player. If humans were to fall into a funk every time they lost due to the weather or an unexpected mishap, we would not have survived very long as a species. Luck turns a loss into a lesson about the environment or game mechanics, not a lesson about which player is superior to another player. As such, our innate social dominance systems fail to kick in and the social penalties from losing are avoided.

The upside
By introducing luck into a game, you can mitigate the ill effects of losing. Losers are often willing to give the game another shot. The fact that humans are notoriously poor at judging their probability of success plays out in the game designer's favor, since even poor players will think they still have a chance of winning.

The downside
Winners fail to feel the rush of victory. Strangers playing against one another in a game of luck will often complain that the game is 'cheap' or 'not a real test of skill'. Many highly competitive players will consciously avoid competitive games involving a high amount of luck since such systems reduce the psychological benefit of winning. What is the point of playing against strangers if you can't beat them into a pulp and demonstrate your dominance?

Pure competitive games of luck between strangers are rare beasts and for good reason. They manage to keep losers around, but the games hardly ever considered fun. Some gambling games may qualify (such as horse betting), yet it is telling that the vast majority of players lose.

An example
Mario Party is an example of a high luck competitive game. The game awards crazy bonuses that appear arbitrary and many games end up with the person in last place winning because they happened to have landed (randomly) on the correct square. Due to the high degree of luck is easy for losers to claim that the victory doesn't matter. The relative status of players barely changes over the course of the game.

3. How playing with friends affects the testosterone in winners and losers
So far, the the previous two studies of competition shouldn't be of much surprise to folks that have designed competitive games. However, the response of players is quite different if they consider one another to be friends. The following is what occurs if friends face off in a competitive game.

Winners testosterone decreases. In essence, dominance behavior dips sharply if you win in front of friends. Friends are generally are people you need to get along with in order to live your life. Imagine for a moment, if you were to win a game and then yelled at them to lick your boots (and you meant it). They probably wouldn't be your friends for very long. Our innate social response is to repress our instinctual dominance urge so as not to damage our friendships.
Loser's testosterone briefly falls and then recovers: The loser is under threat of being put in a low status position. However, once they receive signals that their trust in their friend is justified, they have no reason to fear a loss of status.

If dominance responses are missing, where is the fun? In general, you see both winners and losers focusing on bonding activities after a competitive game.

They discuss the great shared moments in the game. Shared experiences create a common ground between players that they can reference in the future.
They compliment one another. Compliments are often reciprocated, creating an opportunity to build mutual respect and indebtedness.
The winner claims they got lucky. This defuses the notion that the winner is in some way dominant or higher status. They frame the game as one of luck which makes the loser feel much better.
Typically, the winner does everything they can to avoid rubbing their victory in the face of the other player. And the loser does everything they can to not dwell on their loss of status. We even have names for friends that engage in inappropriate dominance behaviors. We call them 'poor winners' or 'poor losers'. Players that behave in a manner conducive to bonding are called 'good winners'. It is rare that you hear the term 'good loser' since the loser is the victim to be consoled.
Mutual smack talk is a form of bonding: This can be confusing for the untrained observer, because good friends will often act like they are engaging in dominance behavior by using smack talk. Yet this is just for show. The moment the smack talk actually infringes upon existing expectations of status, the mood of players will change abruptly. You'll often see accusations of one player 'taking it too seriously.' It is a good demonstration of trust to play at dominance, but to actually assert dominance between friends is considered out of bounds.

Bonding requires some form of communication channel. In a game played in a living room such as Mario Kart or a board game like Carcasonne, there are plenty of ambient opportunities. In PC games, text is the common channel. In console games, chat serves this purpose. Game mechanics can also be used as a form of in game communication. Tagging in Counterstrike is a good example of a game mechanic used to demonstrate status or shared affiliation.

The upside
With the increased popularity of couch gaming on the Wii and social gaming between friends on platforms such as Facebook, understanding the dynamics of competition between friends is critical to creating a successful game.

The most important realization is that typical form of 'fun' that we associate with competitive games is either reduced or turned into a negative experience. Competitive game play with friends becomes less about winning and more about shared experiences. This is a very different emotion. The ability to tell player stories, communicate, discuss and joke with one another are all features that enable the core delivery of value to the player. In some sense, the actual competition is secondary to the bonding that occurs around the activity. The 'fun' that comes from playing with friends is completely different than the 'fun' associated when playing with strangers.

The downside
Again, you can't rely on 'hard fun' to deliver the same jolt as you would in a competition between strangers. The simple switch from playing with strangers to playing with friends results in such a shift in player psychology that you now need to rethink your reward and communication mechanisms.

It is easy to be fooled. The mechanics of the game like Unreal Tournament when played with strangers or friends are apparently identical; you shoot and you move. Yet the experience ends up being radically different. It turns out that existing social relationships and ambient communication methods are as much a part of the game as is the level design and the bullet physics. All too often I see designers building a game that they play with their buddies on the dev team. The group knows one another, can yell out in victory and ends up having an immense amount of fun. Then that same game is released online and immediately strangers begin griefing one another and creating an actively offensive elitist environment. The social graph of the playtesters is not the same as that of the actual players. As a result, the playtest sample is massively flawed.

Here's a little chart to keep it all straight:

An example
Let's return to Mario Party. Why would anyone play a luck based competitive game that provides poor rewards for winning? One clue is that Mario Party is always played with people sitting together on a couch. It is a social game about improving your friendship, not about beating the snot out of someone. Due to the game being played in person, there is immense communication between players and almost all communication is focused on bonding over a shared experience. The key gameplay yields is social fun, not hard fun.

It is perhaps not surprising that Nintendo multiplayer franchises have been slow to move into the online world. Most Nintendo games are designed to be played with friends. Due to low concurrency, synchronous play models and a lack of scheduling, most console gaming services are populated by strangers playing with strangers. Changing the dominant type of fun that forms the core of your game changes your value proposition to the player. This is a major brand mismatch that likely needs an entirely new franchise (such as Halo), not a minor design tweak.

4. How players differ by pro-social or pro-dominance inclination
To complicate matters, there are in fact two distinct populations of players in all these studies. The first are pro-dominance players who are predisposed to react to situations in a dominant fashion. They tend to have a higher base level of testosterone in their system and their level rise or fall more strongly in situations where they win or lose.

The second group are pro-social players who are predisposed to react to competitive situations with a focus on relationship building. In general, they have a lower base level of testosterone. Intriguingly, they do not experience the same misery of failure. In some sense, they aren't playing to win so they don't mind losing. In fact, some studies suggest they even experience increased stress and reduced performance on complex cognitive tasks when they are thrust into a high status position. Winning is a punishment.

Age may also be a factor. Testosterone peaks in the late twenties and drop steadily after age 30. By age 40, 19 to 47% of males fall into the low testosterone category, depending on the accepted cut off.

The downside
From a game design perspective, this split in your population has some interesting implications. When you create a game that rewards players by winning alone, there are two groups that you fail to address. The first is of course, the losers. The second however, are pro-social players that are motivated more by forming relationships than by demonstrating status. You can give them opportunities to 'be the winner', but these rewards will fall flat.

Recommendations
These patterns of competition give designers some useful tools.

Note 1: Your design should explicitly differentiate between friends and strangers
You need to differentiate up front between friends and strangers in your design. If you fail to separate these two populations, you'll end up creating system that inevitably alienate multiple segments of your player base. Many of the problems stem from how communication channels are used by each group.

If you create a game for friends:

Winning strangers will use the communication channels intended for building reporte to instead act out their dominance and aggression urges. Teabagging is an example of a humiliation behavior that tends to encourage losers to leave.
Losing strangers will use the communication channels to denigrate the winners or claim luck or environmental issues were at work. This makes the winners more likely to leave since this is not the 'good job!' pat on the back they were hoping for. Instead of bowing and fame, they are greeted with yells of 'cheaters' and 'lucky'.

If you create a game targeted exclusively at strangers

Due to lack of communication channels, winning friends will have no way to reduce the bite of their victory. There is the risk of permanently damaging your relationship with the loser.

By separating friends from strangers, you can offer each population rewards and game mechanics appropriate to their desires. Winning strangers can be complimented in isolation. Losing strangers can be given feedback that emphasizes the luck of the situation and their increased future chance of victory. Friends can be given communication tools that allow them to bond.

Note 2: Games that focus on playing with friends result in stronger retention across a broader audience.

Friends encourage other friends to join since they want to share the experience with them in order to increase their bond.
Friends tend to encourage existing players to play more since they want to deeper their bond.
There is only one class of player that is alienated by bonding oriented play: pro-dominance players that are not able or willing to play amicably with friends. This is arguably a big group (upwards of ~50% of males age 14 to 39) Yet this is distinct minority in comparison to the broader population.

This insight gives some indication why asynchronous social network games grow so rapidly. People typically play with friends and are predisposed to communicate their game experiences and feel social pressure to repeat them. In contrast, competitive activities between strangers tend to result in a steady decline in player populations.

Note 3: Test with strangers and friends separately
As tempting as it is to test your multiplayer game with the readily available team playing within shouting distance, understand that you are fatally polluting your data. Larger scale online tests that allow strangers to interact and figure out how to dominate and insult one another will yield a much more realistic understanding of the culture that will evolve out of many competitive multi player game systems.

Note 4: If you must include communication channels in your online game, create a design that turns strangers into friends.
If you include rich communication channels in a competitive game, strangers will use them to exert their dominance. The way around this is to explicitly create groups where people act as friends. This leads to bubbles of cooperation even within a competitive game.

Assign players to a common affiliation. Counterstrike does this by having sides that you join from the start of each mission.
Create a common goal: Horde mode in Gears of War does this by giving players the goal of surviving the onslaught together.
Create a common experience of suffering or joy: In Eve Online, players partake in vast highly destructive battles. Even after vicious losses, companies still stick together since the suffering gives them a visceral common experience that strengthens their bonds.
Offer opportunities for reciprocation: In Left 4 Dead, players can help one another if they are in trouble.
Provide channels of communication: In Farmville, players can send messages to one another in game and via Facebook notifications. This helps players negotiate group norms and bond over shared experiences.
Allow individual choice: In WoW guilds, players actively choose to participate in a particular group. Players that allowed to choose freely will have a greater affiliation than players that are forced to rely on other players. I find designs were performance is improved with other players works better than ones where players are punished if they do not cooperate.

Conclusion
When we design a game, we are constantly on the lookout for 'fun'. However our ability to identify and augment fun is only as good as our mental model of what fun looks like. Our commonsense models of competition overvalues the delight expressed by winners and undervalues the reactions of other player populations. By adopting a more sophisticated model of how winners and losers react in various situations, a designer has a much better chance of knowing why their design fails and how they might fix it.

The data I've covered is not complete for all populations. For example, there are fewer studies looking at how testosterone changes in women. Though we commonly think of it as a 'male hormone', testosterone is actively produced by both sexes and appears to serve similar purposes in regards to dominance. However, not all behaviors found in men have been reliably produced in studies involving women. Nor have all the studies been validated on older populations, different cultures or children. Scientists have a tendency to use male college students because they are readily available and it is much easier to measure their testosterone. This can skew the results. The solution is to use these guidelines as a starting point and then continually test your hypothesis about competitive play. Put your game designs in front of a diverse group of players and see if they react as you expect. By looking through the lens of a richer mental model, your informed experiments will guide your game in the right direction.

My personal take on these studies is that there is vast potential for new pro-social competitive games. The market took an odd turn for a short while:

Early consoles involved 2 to 4 players gathered around the TV. Play was primarily social.
We lost the focus on playing with friends with the advent of online play and low concurrency platforms. Since we were playing with strangers, the primary class of fun switched to games of dominance.
The advent of social networks again allows us to target online multiplayer games at audiences guaranteed to be friends.

Now we have a fresh opportunity to design friendly competitive games that build relationships instead of breaking them down.

take care
Danc.

References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testosterone
Competition with friends
Competition and testosterone
Implicit Power Motivation Moderates Men's Testosterone Responses to Imagined and Real Dominance Success
The Social Endocrinology of Dominance
http://www.livescience.com/health/060814_testosterone_death.html
http://men.webmd.com/testosterone-15738?page=2
High testosterone linked to miserly behavior
http://blog.ihobo.com/2009/10/testosterone-and-videogames.html: This is a great article by Chris Bateman that I somehow managed to sub-consciously rewrite. I'm not sure if I've added much that he hasn't covered already. :-)

Flash Love Letter: The Music Video?

2009-10-02T11:55:00.002-06:00

Nathan Germick is a brilliant fellow. He recently performed at a social games meetup in San Francisco. Apparently, he had been reading the Flash Love Letters. This is the result.

I take away the following:

Flash games are incredibly sexy. Don't let your wife see this or you may lose her forever to this floppy maned Flash engineer siren. Or there may be some transferal of sex appeal and the ladies will see your work in a rather exciting new light.
You don't need to read my original essays any more: Nathan has captured all the basics of premium Flash games right here. This is the equivalent of Cliffs Notes. So easy!
You should spread this video: Instead of forwarding on all those boring links to heavy essays full of text and numbers, just forward this video on to anyone who has the smallest interest in making games. You will infect them and they will be better for it.

Do you wanna buy flowers?

Danc.

Speaking at GDC Austin

2009-09-15T20:07:00.003-06:00

Just a quick note. I'll be speaking at GDC Austin this Wednesday.

Premium Flash Games: https://www.cmpevents.com/GDAU09/a.asp?option=G&V=3&id=404892
Indie Business Rant: https://www.cmpevents.com/GDAU09/a.asp?option=C&V=11&SessID=9861

I'll be in Austin all week, so if you are in the area and you'd like to chat, drop me a note at danc [at] lostgarden.com.

Update: Here are a couple of links reporting on the talks

take care

Danc.

Flash Love Letter (2009) Part 2

2009-08-15T12:14:00.001-06:00

In the previous post, we covered:

Chapter 1 - The Potential of Flash: The great potential of Flash as a platform and the big question: Why are there so few great Flash games?
Chapter 2 - Making money: How do Flash developers currently make money.

In this post I'll cover:

Chapter 3 - Generating value: How Flash developers currently create 'valuable' game for their players?

Chapter 3 - Generating Value

Okay, so you are asking for money for your Flash game. Do you have something worth selling?

Let's be blunt: most Flash games on the market are not worth purchasing. That 2-minute prototype you tossed together in your dorm room with rectangles for graphics is the proverbial "piece of poo." No one in their right mind should spend money on such a slight wisp of entertainment.

Sales is about an honest exchange of value between two parties. To fulfill your part of the deal, you need to give your players a valuable experience in return for their cash. You need to make your players fall in love.

I'll cover the following topics:

The problem with short form games
A new definition of value
The game mechanics of retention

The problem with short form games

If you track the average play time that a Flash game provides to its customers, you'll see most games average less than 8 minutes of play. Such a short average play time is not enough time to establish value in the eyes of the customer. Players witness a flicker of value and then the game is done.

Aggregators dominate short form media

In other industries that deal with short form content, the typical strategy is to aggregate content together to create an hour or two of spectacle or a long term service. Musicians create concerts and albums. Improv groups package their skits into longer shows. Short story writers release anthologies or piggyback onto magazines which in turn are bundled into subscriptions.

Flash games have historically followed the same strategy. The little snippets of game play are bundled into portals. One game may not be all that compelling on it's own, but a portfolio of a few dozen highlighted games is enough to keep the player coming back again and again. Only in aggregate are Flash games valuable.

There are several downsides to this model for the developer:

Players fall in love with the portal: Players start thinking of Addicting Games or Newgrounds as a go to source of entertainment, not NinjaKiwi or Sean Cooper.
Little long term love for the game: Games are treated as disposable moments in the broader experience of wasting an evening surfing a game portal. Some may provide brief burst of joy, but this just reinforces the appeal of the portal.
Dominant aggregators exercise editorial control. The terminology is 'portfolio management' or 'selecting titles that match our audience'. The effect is the same. Dominant aggregators often apply effective pressure to developers to make what the aggregators desire and in turn disconnect developers from the real needs of the customers. Though well intentioned, editorial efforts typically results in a reduction of consumer choice, an elimination of innovative outliers and a suppression of disruptive business models. Currently Flash portals are quite open, but these behaviors are beginning to creep into practices of some like Addicting Games and MiniClip.
Lack of trust in the game developer: When the developer asks directly for money, the customers runs away. It is like the clown at the circus asking you to pay after you already paid an entrance fee. The customer doesn't know the clown is starving. They naturally assume that they are just part of the show. Clowns asking for money = creepy; Flash game developers asking for money = creepy.

Note on payment services and trust
The concept of paying for Flash games is still new to players. Payment services like HeyZap or MochiCoins see this as one of the major issues to creating microtransaction games. They attempt to solve the problem of developer trust by creating heavily branded and marketed payment services. The implicit message is "You don't trust the starving clowns, but you can trust us!"

Time will tell if any of these services gains a large enough network of 'converted' customers necessary to make their branding heavy strategy pays off. Either way, the presence of these services is quite positive to the developer community. In order to thrive, they must spend considerable amounts of time and marketing dollars to convince both developers and players to adopt microtransactions. The end result is a large population of educated players who are willing to pay and large group of game that let them pay. This is the high order bit. Once you have such a culture of buyers, developers can more easily present themselves as a trusted vendor without worrying about the clown factor.

The ability to take control lies in the hands of the developers

The root of this situation stems solely from the actions of current developers. Flash games, made with little overt influence by any publisher, boss or dictator, suffer from short experiences, poor branding and poor engagement with their players. As long as Flash developers insist on making short form content that players see as disposable entertainment, portals will continue to be the primary value providers in the ecosystem. Portal influence will grow, dominant companies will emerge and the margin for developers will fall even further. This has been the history of aggregator dominated media throughout history and there is little evidence that short form Flash games will escape this fate.

The only way this balance of power will shift is if developers actively strive to assume a role as the primary provider of value to the customer.

The cultural root of the short form games habit

In order to do that, you need to look at why you are making short-form games. Is it a lack of time and resources? I don't think so since I see casual and indie titles pour years into their games. It is common for members of the rogue-like development community to work on a single game for more than a decade. Cockroaches don't need to release to survive so they can keep plodding away on a game until it is ready.

Short form games are ultimately self propagated part of the Flash development culture. There exists an entire community tied to a highly effective positive feedback system that encourages the creation of short unbranded games. This same system fails to reward developers who create longer branded games.

Game developers currently judge the success of their games on several poor metrics:

Game ratings on portals: Players on a particular portal rate the game usually on a scale of 1 to 5 stars. Highly rated games are given more traffic by the portals. With this particular rating system, games with overly long introductions that deliver value late in the play session are at risk of being bailed on by easily bored players. Inevitably these players rate games with a 0. This creates a natural incentive to deliver as much easy value as possible in as short a time as possible. It ends up being cheaper to produce a 3-minute 'complete' experience that earns a 5-rating than it is to create a 60-minutes experience that earns the same rating.
Number of 'plays': The other metric developers care about is how many they serve. This metric over emphasizes the importance trial players who click the link, but don't play the game. The metric spikes up when your game spread throughout the various portals and drops off rapidly there after. Again, there is no incentive to make games with depth. Instead you want a new title with a catchy intro that gets people watching that ad. Putting effort into anything longer doesn't improve your numbers.
Weekly and Daily Top 10 lists: Portals put up list that highlight the best new content for the week or day. These acts as a means of letting games bask in the public gaze and are highly coveted both for their traffic and their implied status. However, games quickly fall off these lists and the only way to get back on is by releasing a new game. This encourages developers to release often in order to get as many shots at the spotlight as possible.

These are horrible feedback systems. They provide an incomplete and inaccurate views of player behavior. They have little to to do with whether or not players love your game. They have little to do with you creating a long term engaging experience. A mildly humorous 30-second animation about ninja bunnies is just as likely to garner a coveted high rating on Newgrounds as the next Fantastic Contraption. The first is disposable content. The second is a viable indie business. The current Flash ecosystem does not differentiate.

I initially couldn't imagine that developers were optimizing their games based of such anemic and poisonous feedback. It is the equivalent of going on a diet because the fun house mirror makes you look fat. And yet...

One of my more shameful habits is to lurk on forums and watch how developers react to one another's game statistics. I'm not proud of my voyeurism, but I find the display of implicit cultural values fascinating. Developers who have a large number of plays (over 10 million) are lionized. Other developers are constantly fixated on if their game will score a 4 or higher on the portal ratings. Any Flash development forum you visit has the same conversations happening again and again. Even worse, smaller portals robotically copy the top ten lists of larger portals, putting poor filtered products on pedestals throughout the distribution system. The result is that new developers find that there are both benefits to their reputation in the community as well as (meager) financial benefits to focusing on short form games.

If you put a man in a dark room and place a candle at the other end of the room, he will walk towards the candle. It matters not if there are bags of gold off to the side or poisonous snakes lying in his path. If developers could have a brighter source of information, they could see how many opportunities they are missing in their blind pursuit of short form games.

Note on short form vs short play sessions
Many Flash gamers like web games because they can pop in for a short play session, have a bit of fun and then leave. It is tempted to assume that short play sessions demand short form games that can be completed in a few minutes. This is not the case.

Facebook games also rely on short play sessions, yet they often run for months or even years. You can design long form games playable in bite sized chunks.

A new definition of value

In order to build value into games, we need to toss out a lot of the existing metrics and create a new definition of what it means to make a valuable Flash game. Instead of worrying about our ratings, rankings or ad impressions, what would it mean to 'deliver value to the player'?

For me, this boils down to three simple questions

Fun: Are players having fun? Do they love your game?
Retention: Are players sticking around and coming back for more?
Money: Are players willing to pay you for your game?

If you build a game where you can objectively answer "Hell, yes!" to all those questions, you've got a game that will pay the bills and delight your players.

You reap what you measure

Perhaps not surprisingly two of the three questions above are not addressed by the current metrics used throughout the Flash community. Let's use our natural desire for feedback and metrics to drive games toward creating real value.

Build metrics into your game that measure Fun, Retention, and Money.
Gather accurate data from statistically valid samples of actual players.
Use the information you gather to inform the design of new features.
Use the information you gather to determine if your new features were successful.

Metrics

Player Fun

It is incredibly valuable to know how players rate the fun of your game. Instead of using portal surveys, create an in-game 'Fun' survey that has the following attributes:

The player is randomly served the survey during 2 minute intervals. So one player may get the survey at 2 minutes in. Another might get it at 4 minutes. And so forth. Each player gets the survey once.
Record the player's answer to the question "How much fun was this game (1 = Not fun, 5 = Very Fun)" This takes only a few seconds and can usually be easily worked into the context of the game.
An optional step at this point is to ask an open ended question "What don't you like about this game so far?".
Average the ratings for each point in time and the graph the results as a line graph. By using a running average of a few days or a week, you'll avoid having your results being swamped by old data from old versions of the game.
By looking at the graph, you'll easily identify the points in time when players find the game to be enjoyable. It tells you if you need to improve the intro, the body of the game, etc.
If you are extra smart, you can show the comments for the point in time where your fun rating dips. This gives you qualitative data to help you diagnose why your scores are dropping at that point in time.

Target: Aim for an average fun score of over 4. You can also track is the percentage of people that rate the game a 5. These are people who passionately love your game and will likely pay for it. For a good example of how to implement player fun using Google Analytics see this post: http://philprogramming.blogspot.com/2009/08/using-google-events-to-track-fun-rating.html
Retention
Repeat players are incredibly valuable. They are people who love you game so much that they will leave it for a day or two and then come back to it because their addiction burns so brightly.
Persist your customer identity.
Record the percentage of users that return at various intervals (5 minutes, 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, 2 weeks, 4 weeks, 8 weeks.)
Target: Aim for a weekly retention % over 20%. A good rule of thumb is that player need to play for two weeks before they make a purchase.
An alternative way of measuring retention is to track the number of times an individual plays your game. Aim for >1% of your players to return to the game more than 20 times.
Money
We want to record ARPU, average revenue per user.
Just take the amount of money you've gotten so far and divide it by the number of unique users who have come into the system.
Target: An ARPU above $0.01 is better than anything you will earn through sponsorships or ad revenue alone. For comparison MochiCoins' rumored ARPU is $0.06. With the proper game, there is no reason why you can't reach an ARPU of $1.00.
Creating the metrics page
Put together a basic HTML metrics page for your game and measure your game religiously. A basic dashboard can be assembled with a few days effort. You can also track events using Google Analytics.
Again, this requires a bit of web programming skills. Unfortunately, there are a limited number of Flash friendly metrics services that handle this type of reporting. If anyone has seen one, let me know. This is a grand opportunity for a company seeking to add value to their Flash game developer services.
Using metrics
Metrics are most useful when they are used to improve a game. Otherwise they are just pretty numbers. I've seen many teams that make collect dozens of metrics and then wallow in a flood of useless data. Don't let this be you. Have a plan of action.
Here are the basic outline of how to use metrics to create customer value.

Release your game to users on a portal. It doesn't need to be a big portal, but it should be capable of delivering a few hundred to a thousand views a day. Feel free to site lock the game if you worry about eventually selling a sponsorship for your game. If your game isn't capable of driving even a few hundred views a day, go back to the drawing board and make a better game. For Bunni, we repeatedly put the game up on Newgrounds.com and took it down again.
Measure the basic metrics mentioned above. This is your baseline.
Make a change to your game that is targeted at improving one or more of the metrics.
Measure again. Is the game better or worse? Ask why.
Repeat steps 3 and 4 until the metrics of game are in a range that meets your target goals.
Expand your test or kill the game: At this point, you can choose to release the game more broadly by launching it on more portals. Alternatively, a game with poor metrics that isn't improving can be killed early in the process, freeing you up to climb more fertile creative hills.

Once you start practicing this process, you'll notice a shift in how you design and build games. You've gone from designing in the dark to steering your game towards delivering value using the light of up-to-date, reliable information.

An example of metrics in action.

When Bunni: How We First Met was released on New Grounds for a test with live users, it scored a soul crushing 2.5 out of 5 on the portal ratings. If we had only external information, we would have had a hard discussion about either scrapping the game or reworking the core mechanic dramatically. In essence, the Newgrounds user ratings told us that we had completely failed to make a game that users loved.

Yet, we had just hooked up our internal fun metrics as described above. Instead of trusting Newgrounds, we were able to us ask directly users how much fun they were having as they played the game. The hope was that we'd get better quality data due to the following factors:

Random sampling: We tried to avoid using self selected ratings which often are biased towards either those with very strong opinions or a niche portion of the population that enjoys rating things.
Better defined question: We asked a standardized question that has been used on hundreds of games over the years. This let us compare the score to known baselines. Often portals offer a bar with a number that user can set. Who knows what criteria portal raters think they are offering an opinion on?
Tie ratings to gameplay: We included time stamp information so we could tie ratings to particular moments in the game. Often there are specific points in time where players experience difficulty. Portal ratings tell none of this information.

The results were fascinating. 200 people had rated the game on Newgrounds. Yet only 40 people had actually played the game. Of the people who played, our average score was 4.22, a rather good number for any game. Interestingly, the player rating actually increased the longer people played the game suggesting our core gameplay was not merely initially fun, but fun for the long haul. Our players were falling in love.

Using this information, we realized:

The core gameplay works quite well and doesn't need to be changed.
Something about the initial experience was turning off large numbers of users before they even played the game.

Of the hundreds of design option initially available to us, there was now one obvious feature that needed improvement. We focused on streamlining the sign-in experience so that we weren't asking for as much personal information upfront. Mere hours later, we initially tested at 3.7 (and stabilized at 4.15) on Kongregate and eventually went on to score a 4.38 on Newgrounds.

In this situation, having the right metrics was the difference between killing the game or making a minor targeted change that led directly to success. Not all decisions are as dramatic, but the basic process of smart design illuminated by accurate data remains.

Note on portal ratings

Bunni's portal ratings sound good, but they are still heavily biased. Our internal surveys settled in at 4.06 (out of 5) after 45 minutes of play. Our first 15 minutes only scores a mediocre 3.6. There is still plenty of room to improve the game that is not readily revealed by existing public feedback systems.

Developer cared about biased portal ratings since they have a direct impact on whether or not the game is picked up by lower tier portals or if the game makes the front page. The good news is that portal ratings lag internal ratings in a predictable manner. Due to the biases involved in portal ratings, if your internal scores are good, portal rating will generally be higher. If you internal scores a bad, portals ratings will generally be lower. As a result, you can simply focus on getting good internal ratings and ignore portal ratings unless there is a major discrepancy.

Pitfalls

Metrics are not a magic bullet that solves all design issues, but they are a powerful tool if used appropriately. There are several pitfalls you'll run into:

Over analyzing: Some designers worry that all the numbers remove the creativity from the game development process. Use common sense. If you are analyzing the correct color of blue, maybe you've gone too far.
Lack of practice: It takes a bit of practice to learn how to use specific metrics. You need to recognize what is noise and what is a meaningful signal. You need to learn what a 'good' rating looks like. This takes time, setting baselines and experimenting.
Out of date: You have to keep metrics up to date as the design changes. Stagnant or out of date metrics will not be used.
Inability to dig deeper: Often developers will implement high level metrics and then not have enough flexibility to find out more once an issue is highlighted. At the very least have the ability to segment your stats based off time so you can see how your latest update affected your results.
Treated as low priority: Developers put off integrating metrics since they don't seem to contribute directly to the game play. This is dumb. You still turn your lights on before you go driving at night even though it takes you an addition 5 seconds to flip the switch.

Benefits

Good to great: If you have made a good game, metrics can help you polish it into a great game.
Finding the important design levers: Rich feedback lets you quickly focus on changes that make a real difference. You can think of the various variables in your game as levers. Turn the right levers and your game will improve. However, time is limited and some levers have a much greater impact than others. Without metrics, developers turn levels willy-nilly, often making the game worse without knowing. The right metric help you identify the levers that really matter. They often aren't what you think they are.
Knowing when to kill a project: If you have a horrible game, metrics won't turn it into a great game, but they will let you know that maybe you are polishing a turd.

Don't fear the metrics. You still need to be just as creative and passionate as before, but now you've got this wonderful information rich environment that gives you immediate feedback. I think of it as painting in a well lit room versus painting in the dark.

My favorite part is that when you release your game to real people and measure the results, you know for a fact if you are delivering value to your customers. That certainty you are adding something valuable to the world feels great. Try it. You'll like it.

What metrics tell you about monetizing your game

Here are a couple of stages of engagement that you'll witness when you look at the metrics for enough games. How you much money you make and the methods you use to make money are directly tied to where your metrics settle.

I often use the metaphor of 'falling in love' when talking about these stages since even though we are using cold hard metrics, we should always remembers that we are attempting to create a highly emotional and human experience.

Flirting: Your game ranks high on fun for the first few minutes. However, weekly retention is close to 0%. Most portal Flash games fall into this category. Ads work well here, but you'll give the vast majority of your revenue to the aggregators and middlemen.
Dating; Your game ranks high on fun for the first hour or two. Weekly retention is still low, falling into the 1% range. However, a large percentage of people rate your game a 5. These players are willing to pay you directly. Monetize them by using a content or time gate to get them to pay a one time fee. Most downloadable casual games fall into this category. There are a small handful of Portal Flash games that reach the dating stage. Dating level games also give up the majority of their revenue to aggregators in middlemen.
Married: Weekly retention is higher with over 20% returning each week. 5% return after after a month. Players have integrated the game into their lives and are willing to spend money on it like any other favored hobby. You'll find individual players willing to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on your game. A long form game that has a larger number of married players is a business that can make good money for years. MMOs and Facebook games fit into this category. There are only a half dozen or so casual and Flash titles that are worth marrying. Games that you can marry are one of the few types of games that lead to long term developer independence and that limit the inexorable dominance of aggregators.

The relationship between fun and retention

Theses categories of engagement point to the incredible importance of retention, a metric that has been historically ignored by Flash game developers. The good news is that if you are already focusing on fun, you are half way there to making a valuable game.

Fun needs to come first. You cannot have a high retention game that players do not find fun. Otherwise, they'll stop playing. So aim for creating a game that ranks above a 4 out of 5 on the fun metric. Once you have a fun core game, you need to extend that fun for as long as possible.

A huge shift for Flash developers who seek to make highly monetizable premium Flash games is that they need to start thinking in terms of weeks worth of play, not minutes.

Game mechanics of retention

Focusing on retention and player engagement changes the type of game that you make. There is an entire world of game mechanics that deal with retention. They are impossible to cover in detail here, but there are some patterns. In general, as an independent developer, you want to make the most game play with the least amount of effort. I live by this particular graph:

The cost of hand crafted content scales linearly while procedural and social content decreases in marginal cost over time. With this as a guiding principle, you can examine various types of content and see if it fits your game.

Narrative, story, and cut scenes exhibit "rapid burnout". In other words, player see them one or twice and then are bored when they see them again. Games that rely on such content have generally low retention metrics. You can mitigate this by releasing new narrative content on a regular basic to keep the product 'fresh', but this has a high cumulative cost.
Linear levels or solvable puzzles also exhibit rapid burnout. Game systems that can be completed or conquered are usually one shot activities. You can layer additional challenges within each level, but often only expert players will be motivated to come back for a second play through.
Some handcrafted content like text or static images can be refreshed cheaply: The type of handcrafted content you include makes a huge difference on the slope of your increasing costs. New text-based questions in a trivia game are relatively cheap compared to creating new God of War levels. An hour of text-based content is likely several orders of magnitude cheaper to build.
Social content is low burnout: People will keep interacting with their friends for years. Mechanics that can tap into this often have very high retention rates. Anything that allows players to chat, share and form social identities in a community is pure gold.
Grinding results in burnout, but it slows the process. Techniques like leveling or purchasing upgrades can dramatically increase the length of the game for very little development and design costs. Think of grinding as method of stretching, but not adding to your content. Grinding techniques only delay the inevitable. They can result in lower fun scores as people feel obligated to play, but aren't enjoying the process of playing. Since you want people to fall in love, such a reaction can be counter productive to your goals.
User generated content systems are low burnout: User generated content is ultimately a social system that encourages users to create consumable puzzles. The puzzles themselves may be short lived, but the community of creators can thrive for decades. This solves the problem of the linearly increasing cost of more handcrafted content by apply large numbers of people working for free.
Algorithmic content has low burnout, but is hard to create and balance: Evergreen mechanics like Bejeweled or random map generation in Nethack keep people playing for hours. However, they are tricky to invent and balance.

An example of a high retention game is one like Puzzle Pirates that has social (avatar, chat, guilds), grinding (levels) and evergreen algorithmic content (puzzles). There is some light narrative in the form of periodic events and very little in the form of conquerable level design. Most games have a mix of all these various types of content and successful services almost always put a portion of their reoccurring revenue towards a steady trickle of low marginal cost handcrafted content. However, a high retention game designs tend to emphasize content with less burnout.

Within these new constraints on your game design lies an opportunity. In my humble opinion, algorithmic and social content lies at the heart of what makes games such an amazing media. If the goal of creating a game that players fall in love with requires that developers are constrained to exploring these two thrilling topics more deeply, so be it.

I personally find it exciting that there are strong financial justifications for encouraging game developers to invest in areas of expression that are wholly unique to games. Games that rely primarily on plot, graphics and disposable levels are bad business in a world where games thrive as high retention services. Now you have justification to say, "Sorry, that cut scene you wanted is a high burnout feature. We'll make more money by improving our game mechanics and investing in additional community features."

Being the primary provider of value is hard work

The goal throughout all this is for developers to assume a role as the primary provider of value to the customer. Unfortunately,this isn't easy. First, it is simply determined, professional labor. You can't simply slap a price tag on any old Flash game and start raking in the dough. You need to invest substantial effort building a rich game that players see as a hobby, not just a five minute fling. This means measuring player engagement and methodically moving beyond the cheap momentary thrills that dominate the current Flash portfolio. These are entirely new skills for most Flash developers and they will not be learned cheaply or quickly.

Secondly, creating engaging long form games is a major cultural shift. It means ignoring and uprooting many of the accepted measurements of status and success worshipped in the Flash community. It is one thing to tell you to "Stop making throw away experiences." It is quite a more difficult task for a new developer to push aside the accepted norms of the tribal community that provides such an easy benchmark for their tentative efforts. Down one path, you can crap out of a short sketch of a game and get kudos (and small amounts of cash!) from people and portals you respect. Down the other it is just you, your users and your metrics slogging towards greatness. Portals will shun you or offer pennies for your hours of labor. Ad networks won't pay you any more than a doodling game that a 12 year old created in a weekend. Only your players will love you. And will you be able to deal with that? Many Flash developers that stumble upon a great gaming service run screaming from success. In their minds, they made Flash games as a quick creative burst. Flash devs do not expect to spend months, even years of their life supporting a turbulent and demanding community of fans.

Luckily there are a lot of Flash developers that are hungry and willing to innovate. That is why I love this market. There are also a lot of Facebook and Casual developers who will happily transfer their business savvy development skills to a blossoming new market. It only takes a handful of successful long form Flash games to plant a flag that say "Here be money!" And the flocking shall begin.

Quick value checklist

Are you ignoring bad metrics like portal ratings?
Are you measuring the holy triumvirate of value: fun, retention, money?
Are you collecting real customer data?
Does your game score 4 out of 5 on the fun scale?
Do players return after a week?
Is your game design amendable to high retention play?
Are you iterating on your game and improving your game as measured by internal metrics? Have you figured out the big levers that affect player experience?
Do you know when you are done? Do you know when you've reached the point where your game has proven value to your players?
Are you willing to bail on the game if it doesn't show signs of improvement?
Are you striving to be the primary provider of value to your customers?

Take care

Danc.

PS: The next chapter will likely follow in a couple of weeks. I find that when I post these, I get all sorts of interesting information from people...which leads to revisions. :-) Next time I'll cover distribution.

References

Integrating Google analytics into Flash: http://philprogramming.blogspot.com/
Implementing Player Fun: http://philprogramming.blogspot.com/2009/08/using-google-events-to-track-fun-rating.html
Retention in Flash games: http://freetoplay.biz/2009/07/23/finding-fatal-flaws-lessons-from-kongregate-cc09/

Bunni Beta and Casual Connect

2009-07-20T19:06:00.001-06:00

You should play Bunni here

Two small announcements:

Bunni: How we first met is now in public beta. There's still a bunch of work left to do. Right now we are stabilizing so that we can turn on the more interesting monetization and distribution features without creating an angry mob.
I will be at Casual Connect in Seattle on Tuesday and Wednesday. I'll be attending talks, but if you want to meet up, drop me a note at danc@lostgarden.com.

Some Bunni beta stats
Players have created 380,000 bunnies so far during the beta.
This was primarily the work of one person, Andre Spierings over a period of 6 months.
The game, in its beta state, scores 4.1 out of 5 on Kongregate. This puts it in the top 0.6% of Flash games.
Bunni uses an extended set of the Small World Prototyping graphics that are available on Lostgarden for free.
If you find any bugs, report them on the BunniBunni.com forums.
take care
Danc.

Flash Love Letter (2009) Part 1

2009-07-05T16:40:00.002-06:00

Flash Love Letter (2009) Part 1

Chapter 1: Introduction

Hello Flash game developer,

Over the past couple months, I've spent a bit of time looking at Flash gaming on web portals like Kongregate and Newgrounds. There are over 14,000 games spread across 30,000 portals with hundreds of new games coming out every month. The output alone is amazing.

Let me cut to the chase. I think that you, Flash game developers, are some of the most talented and inspirational people working today in game development. Your passion for building games burns so incredibly brightly. Your ability to quickly make and distribute games is second to none. You hold immense potential to transform the future of games.

Let me tally your blessings:

Cheap and effective distribution: Your platform reaches over 350 million players, more than all home consoles combined. A poor college student can release a half decent game and within a month, a million people will play it. Such reach is unheard of on almost any other platform.
Robust technology: Graphics, animation, sound, video, physics and networking technology is freely available and works surprisingly well. You are building on one of the most accessible and robust multimedia platforms that has ever existed in the history of the world. Where other teams waste man months just getting a black triangle showing on the screen, you can have a working game up and running in hours.
World class creative tools: Flash is fed by an art pipeline familiar to millions of artists that has been polished and tested over the past decade.
Thousands of developers making stuff just for you: With a few simple API calls, you have the entire power of the web at your finger tips. Want to send emails, suck in friend lists from Facebook, access payment systems, or let people buy underpants emblazoned with your logo? It is all there waiting for you to piggyback atop.
Immense creative opportunities: Flash is uniquely positioned to create social games, mobile games, location-based games, games that suck in databases, games that use video, games that use real-time audio, games that connect millions. The number of radical new game genres is primed to explode like no other time since the 80's. And you have all the tools necessary to drive the wave of game play innovation forward.
Freedom: You can make whatever you want. Unlike developers of other platforms, there is minimal interference from traditional gate keepers such as big company politics, retailers or publishers. The Man doesn't own you, at least not yet.

Such riches! Your platform of choice contains almost everything you need to radically transform gaming as we know it.

The mystery

So...where are the great world changing Flash games? They appear to be missing.

What we'll cover

Flash games are currently the ghetto of the game development industry. Compared to the number of players it serves, the Flash game ecosystem makes little money, launches few careers, and sustains few developer owned businesses. Despite the vast potential of the ecosystem, Flash games contribute surprisingly little to the advancement of game design as an art or a craft.

In order to understand why this promising game platform is such a surprising dissapointment, we'll look at Flash games from three perspectives:

Chapter 2 - Making money: How do Flash developers currently make money.
Chapter 3 - Generating value: How Flash developers currently create 'valuable' game for their players?
Chapter 4 - Reaching customers: How developers currently reach their players.
Chapter 5 - Premium Flash games as a service: A mental model for understanding the new world of web gaming.

For each step, I'll cover alternative techniques that give you, the game developer, make even better games.

Chapter 2 - Making Money

Money makes the world go round. It pays salaries and gives developers the time and space to create creative products. Yet, Flash game developers don't seem to be making much cash.

Flash gaming's Achilles heel

I took a look at the Flash ecosystem to see if I could spot the fatal flaw.

The red flows are where people pay out money and the green items are places where people earn money. Here are the common money sources for the developer:

Direct: The game developer sells ads from a generic ad service on their personal website or portal.
Game specific ad service: An ad service such as Mochi collects Flash ads that are typically placed in front of a game during loading.
Site licenses: A portal pays a developer a fixed fee for a customized site locked version they hope will increase player retention.
Sponsorship: A company pays a developer a fixed fee in order to direct customers from other portal to their portal in the hopes of capture those customer's lifetime ad revenue.

There is one obvious fact: the entire flash ecosystem is driven by low quality advertising. Piddling amounts of ad money flows into the developer's pocket through a variety of obfuscated middlemen.

Ads are a really crappy revenue source

For a recent game my friend Andre released, 2 million unique users yields around $650 from MochiAds. This yields an Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) of only $0.000325 per user. Even when you back in the money that sponsors will pay, I still only get an ARPU of $0.0028 per user. In comparison, a MMO like Puzzle Pirates makes about $0.21 per user that reaches the landing page (and $4.20 per user that registers)

What this tells me is that other business models involving selling games on the Internet are several orders of magnitude more effective at making money from an equivalent number of customers. When your means of making money is 1/100th as efficient as money making techniques used by other developers, maybe you've found one big reason why developers starve when they make Flash games.

The effect of 1/100th as much money

Due to the low quality revenue streams, even great games make beer money, not rent money. A good game will make $1000 and a great game might earn $5000-7000. A rule of thumb is that you need to release 10 good Flash games a year to convince your girlfriend's father you are not a bum.

10 games a year may not seems like such a big deal to some, but there is a hidden one-two punch that knocks most developers into bankruptcy

Most Flash game developers have little financial cushion and live paycheck to paycheck.
Flash game revenue is highly bursty due to a reliance on landing sponsorships upon release of their latest game.

It is common for a developer to release several games in a row and get sponsorships or licenses for each one. But the inevitable randomness of game development results a month or two delay on your next project. It only takes missing one or two of those 10 games to force a professional Flash developer into ever waiting arms of endless soul sucking contract jobs. It is surprisingly hard to change the world when you are stuck re-skinning the latest Mountain Dew advergame.

Only cockroaches survive without money.

It doesn't matter much raw talent you possess. With the right support, you could be the next Miyamoto. Sorry, not important. All that really matters is that you possess what I call the 'cockroach gene'. Can you churn out 'good enough games' and survive if your games repeatedly fail to make money?

The following are survival strategies employed by successful Flash developers:

Be a full time student: This is the dominant category of Flash developers.
Live in a socialist country: I'm looking at you, Scandinavians.
Have (rich) family that will support you: I've met folks that do this but it is uncommon.
Starve for your art: The Jason Rohrers of the world are also rather rare.

If any of these fit, congratulations. You are in the small percentage of developers that have the financial support necessary to be a Flash game developer. Everyone else, thousands upon thousands of talented developers, fall in a category called 'churn'. They can't even survive on ramen and passion. So they move on to richer markets or leave game development behind forever.

Such a loss. Such an incredible waste. I'd guess we are losing 95% of our best Flash games because the people with the talent to make great games find the Flash market financially untenable.

Solution: Players as a revenue source

Ads are a good secondary source of revenue, but surely there are richer sources of revenue? There is an obvious one, used for decades by all other game industries...why not ask the players for money?

Here's the theory behind asking for money for a game.

Players have access to lots of games. Most of which are free. This is the reality of the market.
However, at a certain point, they start playing your game.
If you've created a great game, some players will fall in love. They will be in the thrall of your reward system and your in game value structures. At this point, they don't care that there are other games. They don't care that they are playing on a portal. All they care about is your game. Games create value through play.
When a player is in love, money is no object. If you ask the player for cash in exchange for more value, they will often agree. It is a good exchange in their eyes: They give you a small bit of change and in return, they get proven, addictive experience that they love.

Ask for the money

When game developers ask for money, they are usually pleasantly surprised. Their customers give them money; in some cases, substantial amounts. I witnessed this early in my career making shareware games at Epic in the 90s and I'm seeing the same basic principles are in play with high end Flash games. Fantastic Contraption, for example, pulled in low 6 figures after only a few months on the market. That's about 100x better than a typical flash game and in-line with many shareware or downloadable titles.

Here are the four steps you need to follow in order to successfully ask for money from your players:

Offer: Offer premium content
Tell: Tell players about what they get if they pay you.
Repeat: Repeat the first two steps until it clicks with the player.
Accept payment: Get the money in your bank account.

Step 1 - Offer

Offer the player something valuable. Take a careful look at what players find valuable about your game and try dividing it up into two buckets: Introductory content and Premium content. Give away gameplay in the Introductory bucket, but sell the content in the Premium bucket. Many Flash developers insist on giving away everything for free. Stop devaluing your work and start creating a premium offer. Below are some ways of creating premium buckets.

Time gates	Players can play for some period of time and then they are locked out until until they pay. For example, players could play for 45 minutes - 1 hour (effective free trial times in the casual space) and then pay to play longer.
Content gate	Players play an initial teaser portion of the game for free and then pay to unlock access to additional content. For example, players could pay to unlock all the levels in a game. This is how many shareware titles worked.
Aesthetic items	Players purchase non-gameplay additions that increase their identity or status. For example, players could pay to give their character a cool outfit that they can show off to their friends.
Abilities	Sell unique abilities that let players experience the game in a new way. For example, players could purchase new jumping boots that let them fly through levels in a way that let's them re-experience the game all over again.
Bundles	Virtual items can be bundled together to create additional value. For example, if people love buying food for their virtual pet, let them buy a 10 pack of food for a 30% discount.
Consumables	Some abilities can expire after a period of time or after a number of uses. For example, you could buy a potion that increases your strength, but you can drink from it 3 times. Also known as "item rentals."
Subscriptions	If certain abilities or bonus are a valuable long term, consider charging a reoccurring fee. For example, you could offer extra storage for advanced players, but charge a monthly fee.
Stackable subscriptions	If certain abilities are additive(such as an experience or currencies multiplier), let players buy multiples of the same thing.
Rare items	Limit the number of items available so that players feel special when they purchase it.
Time limited items	Offer some items for short periods of time so that players feels that they lucked out finding the product in time.
Sale items	Set a standard pricing system for items and then offer some items for sale. This works great with time limited offers. Again, players love to get deals.
Gifts	Players seek to maintain social bonds by gifting other players with items or abilities.
Accelerators	Many games have a 'grind' that artificially lengthens the game. Players with little time are willing to purchase items that let them reduce or eliminate the time consuming activities in the game.
Physical goods	T-shirts and other branded items

Examples of premium content bucketing techniques

There is no need to limit yourself to any single one revenue stream. There are lots of different types of players and each player values something differently. Some players may be willing to buy a t-shirt. Others may want 5 stackable subscriptions. Others may just want a pretty new character with a panda head. When you restrict your game to a single revenue source, you miss out on gaining money from all the different types of customers that would have paid you if you had just given them the right offer.
When you design your game, pick three or four revenue streams and build them into your game. Here are some categories of users that you may want keep covered.
People who don't want to pay: Advertising is a good option to keep around. A few hundred bucks is still money in the bank.
People who are interested in more of the same: Once you've established the value of your game, some players want more. Give them more levels, more puzzles, more enemies in exchange for cash.
People who are interested in status or identity improvements: Some people see games as means of expression and identity. Give them items that let them express themselves or customize their experience.
People who have limited time: Some people live busy lives and want to consume your game when they desire and how they desire. Cheat codes, experience multipliers and other systems that bypass the typical progression all help satisfying this customer need.

Step 2 - Ask

Tell the player what they are going to receive in return for their money. If people don't understand the promise of what they are buying, they won't pay.

Ensure the user sees the offer: Screenshots, feature lists, and evocative language should be placed clearly in front of the user. You want convey to the player the value, both practical and emotional that they will experience if they were to gain access to the premium content.
Tie your offer of premium value to an explicit request for money. We live in a capitalist society so people understand the concept of buying something. Don't ask for a donation. Don't ask players to "give you what they feel like giving." People will think you are a charity case and in my experience your revenues will drop by 90% or more. Give the offer a specific price, be it $10 or 200 gold in your favorite virtual currency.
Time the appearance of the offer. You can ask for money when players are caught up in the emotional moment of play. Which is more valuable to the player? A Pirates of the Caribbean T-shirt at the mall or a Pirates of the Caribbean T-shirt right after you walk off the Disney ride and are flush with excitement? Both your odds of buy the shirt and your pleasure in owning the shirt are greater when you buy it after the ride. Use game design to make players fall in love and in their moment of game playing passion, they will be willing to spend money.

Step 3 - Repeat

Repeat telling and asking several times until the value of your offer sinks in. Players need to see the offer multiple times before they'll commit to making a purchase. One technique that works well is to put the offer in the natural flow of playing the game.

Prominently place the offer in high traffic areas of the game such as entry, save, in game store and exit screens.
Email the user periodically to let them know about specials or sales. By asking them to read an email, you are costing them time, so make sure that what you offer is valuable and delightful or else you'll end up with angry customers.

You can risk annoying the user if you do this too much, but in my experience coaching indie and Flash game developers, they err on the side of being hiding their offers. I've seen offer screen buried in option menus, guaranteeing that less than 1% of users will ever see them. I've seen offers that appear only if you click a tiny button. Users see it once and then never see it again. Don't be embarrassed. As long as your offer is clear, professional and doesn't attempt to trick or overwhelm the user, most players will see your purchase button as just another useful, functional part of the UI.

Step 4 - Get the money into your bank account

Use a payment service to process their order. The good news is that there are dozens of 3rd party payment systems on the market. The bad news is that they all have subtle differences that have a huge effect on both your short term and long term revenue.

The many layers of payment middlemen, each taking their cut.

(Margins are approximate and will vary depending on the service)

Some things to consider:

Margin: How much does the payment service take? The payment company is providing you with a service and deserves to be paid. However, you'll find that some companies take 10% and others take upwards of 75%. Companies pitch various bundled services such as storage or fraud protection as justification for their increased fees. Some companies will also share some of the margin with portals in return for them carrying the games. Shop around and be honest with the trade off you are making. Remember you'd need to get 5 times as much traffic to makes the same amount of money if you pick a service with a 50% margin vs a 10% margin.
Processing fees: Most Flash payment systems are simply a repackaging of non-Flash payment services with a pretty UI and a bigger margin tacked on top. The existing payment services already takes a chunk of the user's money in the form of 'processing fees' Ask if the advertised payment company margin is inclusive or additional to the existing 'processing fees'. A 30% margin seems reasonable, until you realize that it is on top of an existing 50% margin for a mobile provider. I like to ask "If the customer pays $10 on their credit card or phone, how much cash ends up in my bank account?"
White box or branded?: Some services like Super Rewards can be reskinned so that they are transparent to the end user. Until the player enters into the actual payment portion of the process, they feel like the stores and such are part of the game. Services like Noboba and MochiCoins are heavily branded with the payment company's logo. Their goal is to get the customer to invest their trust in them, the payment provider. The downside is that customers don't invest as much trust in you, the game developer.
Customer registration?: In order to track customers and their purchases, you'll want a secure login system. Some payment services let you build your own. Others require you to use theirs so that they can control the primary relationship with the customer. Often these services will not release customer lists to the developer. This becomes a problem long term if you release multiple games and want to run cross promotions.
Storage support: Once players purchase an item or feature, they'll want to have access to their stuff when they sign back in. This means your game will need online storage and a server back end. Some payment services offer this as part of the package, which is great for the common situation where the developer doesn't know much about back end programming.
Lock-in: Do you have the ability to easily switch to another payment service? In general, the more comprehensive solutions with customer make it more difficult to switch. With some comprehensive services, capturing customers is more valuable than your money. You only provide cash for a single game, but a customer can be sold and resold dozens of times to dozens of games. Run far, far away from such companies since their best business interests are not aligned with your best interests.

We are in the early stages of the Flash payment market. Often new game developers will unthinkingly jump on the first service that they happen across. In this low information environment, payment services can charge unreasonably high margins and very few developers will complain. Many will be excited to give away 50% of their money because they weren't earning any money previously.

A payment provider should be a reliable commodity service, not a major business partner. Over time, I predict we'll see more transparency and competition which should drive down prices. The ideal payment service is one with low margins, low switching costs, no branding and APIs that let you cheaply and easily tie into generic, developer controlled login and storage services. This will come about as a competitive market works its magic, but until then the opportunists are out in full force and Flash developers will pay a premium for their ignorance. By asking, comparing, and publicly publishing information about margins, developers can encourage payment providers to compete openly and honestly.

The good new is that some generic payment systems are cheap to hook up to your Flash game and allow for experimentation. On one project, we used SuperRewards and reskinned their front end to it fit nicely into our game. They charge 20% margin on all purchases, but we can now transparently swap in primary payment provider for credit cards, mobile etc. By mixing and matching we can build a payment front end that makes us more money. We own our own virtual currency and we own our customer data.

This was accomplished with one programmer in 2 weeks of work and can be reused across multiple games. Such a path isn't for everyone, especially if you lack web programming skills. However, with a little elbow grease, you can tap existing, proven, generic payment services to roll your own with very little downside.

Execution matters

Most Flash game developers are ignoring all of these steps. A few are doing a couple steps poorly, failing and then running about screaming that you can't make money off charging for premium content. Instead of jumping to ill formed conclusions, try executing with vigor some of the basic business lessons learned in the past 2000 years of capitalism. Just going through the motions isn't enough.

Here's an example of a good idea poorly executed. Dan Hoelck is the very talented developer behind the polished Flash game Drunken Masters, a game that attempts to charge for premium content. He created a content gate, displayed his offer to the player and integrated a payment service. Unfortunately, the resulting sales process is torpedoed by multiple fatal flaws. As a result his conversion rates are miserable: 0.01% of users purchase his offer. You'd hope to see numbers closer to 0.1 - 1%.

The call to action isn't clear. The offer is labled 'cheats' (not a positive connotation) and then crams lots of little detail in a tiny font at the bottom of the screen. I'm looking for a big 'buy now' button and some pretty pictures telling me all the lovely things I'll get. This is nowhere to be seen.
The value of the offer is questionable. He gives 90+% of the game away for free, and lets you purchase a few miscellaneous features that most people don't need. A good rule of thumb when using a content gate is that your premium content should be seen as twice as valuable as the demo experience.
Making purchasing difficult: In order to purchase, you need to manually type in a URL, find the right link to click on and then purchase. Is this necessary? Every step of the pipeline, you are going to lose large numbers of users. As much of the purchase flow should be within the game as possible.
Charging too little. Dan charges $1.50 for his game and this is likely too little. Beware your natural tendency to undercharge. People who love your game are surprisingly price insensitive. For example, in the microtransaction-based MMO Domain of Heroes, prices range from "$0.99 to $349.99 and about 80% of the revenue comes from purchases at the $19.99 pricepoint." With a little price experimentation I suspect Dan could have increased his price to $5 or $10 and increased his overall revenues substancially.

It is okay to fail. The basic system Dan made took him ~40 hours to implement and it is obvious he has learned a lot of lessons from the experiment. Building an effective sales pipeline is just as much a craft as making a great game. As a game developer you need to approach the task as a new skill to master that you likely aren't going to get right the first time. Put in the basics, measure your results and apply what you've learned to your next project.

But people will hate me if I charge money!

Some developers I've talked with worry that they'll alienate others by charging directly for their game. Here are some common concerns:

Bad reputation: Many Flash game developers are not in it for the money, but to be part of the indie community. The threat of a poor reputation can be frightening. The truth is that modest, self effacing developers that find financial success are worshiped like heroes. Just ask Colin of Fantastic Contraption how he was received at GDC. If you are worried about your reputation, stop starving yourself into hipness. Instead create great games and be generous to others. A good reputation follows naturally.
Players complaining: So what if you end up being hated by a few kids that feel entitled to free stuff? It isn't the end of the world. Usually the money and thanks from delighted customers more than make up for a few sour grapes tossed about on dark and skanky corners of the Internet.
Bad rankings: It is true that players will occasionally mark down paid games out of ignorance and spite. Luckily there is a solution. If you offer real value to customers in love with your game, your fan's rapturous applause will drown out whiners. Players, in aggregate, tend to forgive great games, even if they need to pay for them.
Sponsors: Sponsors don't want the game they serve competing directly with their primary source of revenue, ads. If you can promote that your premium game results in better player engagement and repeat plays, most portals will happily take their cuts of the resulting ad revenue and leave you to monetize your customers. A smaller number will worry that your premium content will pollute their 'free' label. An even smaller number will be greedy and ask for a cut of your hard earned customer revenue. In the short term, you can ignore demanding portals. The market is highly fragmented (30,000 portals!) and no portal owns more than 5% of the players. At this point in the market, developers have the ability to walk away from the greedy minority. Suggest reasonable terms where portal keep their existing ad revenue and you keep all in game revenue. If they balk, leave the bastards to rot.

If you make a great game played for hours on end by millions of people, you deserve to be paid. Stop worrying about how people 'might' react. Ask a fair price for the value that you provide.

Quick monetization check list

Are you asking users for money?
Are you telling users what they'll get if they pay you?
Have you hooked up a payment system before you launch your game?
Are you tapping multiple revenue streams that appeal to different types of users?
Are you basing your design decisions on the behavior of people who make you money?
Are you appropriately filtering the feedback of people who do not make you money?

Take care
Danc.

PS: Time for a short break! I'll follow up with the next few chapters in a couple of days.

References

Puzzle Pirates Metrics: http://www.slideshare.net/capncleaver/metrics-for-a-brave-new-whirled?type=presentation
Andy Moore interview on Fantastic Contraption: http://freelanceflashgames.com/news/2009/05/18/interview-with-andy-moore-manager-of-fantastic-contraption/
http://evolutionlive.blogspot.com/2009/06/ten-ways-to-monetize-your-flash-game.html
http://virtual-economy.org/blog/arpus_in_social_networks_and_s
Ways of monetizing Flash games: http://www.heyzap.com/developers/guide
http://www.flashgamesponsorship.com/advice/advice-from-industry-players/selling-premium-content-the-drunken-masters-experiment.html

My top secret reading list

2009-06-08T14:56:00.006-06:00

I figured that it was time to share with my secret stash. I've been using Google Reader to tag interesting articles and publish them all to a single location. Occasionally, I've added snarky comments. You can find the entire treasure trove here:

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/04653747362202207327

This list is updated a bit more regularly than my blog, but since I don't believe in covering Lost Garden with link fests, I'll keep it as a hidden secretive thing. So shh...tell only special people.

What a glorious summer day,

Danc.

Engineering Emotions: More predictions come to pass

2009-06-02T16:03:00.001-06:00

Back in 2007, I wrote about some hypothetical technologies like real time motion capture, voice recognition and biosensors that were on the horizon that would have a dramatic impact on how we design emotional games. Those technologies are now becoming mainstream with console accessories like Microsoft Natal and the Wii Vitality Sensor. Others techniques like feeding player's input into internet API's like search and social networks are already easily implemented using basic capabilities available to even the most limited game devices on the market.

In the essay Constructing Artificial Emotions, I described a 'crazy' futuristic game design called Bacchus:

"Bacchus is a multiplayer dancing game with a religious theme. The selling point is its ability to evoke intense emotions.

Imagine if you will, a decrepit theater filled with writhing, dancing people. The lights flare and swoop in time and the people chant in unison. A massive screen shows a mirror image of the hall like some surrealistic portal into an alternate universe. Instead of blokes and lasses in street clothes, the on screen spirits are clad in ornate ritualistic garb. The movements on each side of screen are eerily synchronized. The pitch of the chant rises.

The screen zooms in on a girl in the center of the room. The crowd, as one, turns and watches her figure on the screen. She begins to dance. At first her movement is controlled and intricate. The screen pulsates and she yells to its beat. The room takes up her words and amplifies them, giving them god-like resonance. Bass mixed with reverb mixed with primal, guttural passion. Her dance becomes wild. The pace increases and she begins to confess.

The theater reacts. Each word she utters shimmers on screen, merging with ghostly photos from her past. In a beat, the entire room witnesses her sorrow over the death of her mother, her time alone in an empty apartment, and her first kiss. An inhumanly beautiful electronic chorus rises, matches and turns her words into a song. Her movements become a blur. Her glowing eyes are ecstatic. At the peak, her spirit on the large screen explodes in light and the girl collapses to the floor in fervent religious swoon.

The crowd goes wild. The screen zooms out and the next god dancer is chosen.

Later, the girl writes to her online friends that the night she danced was the single most powerful spiritual and emotional experience in her entire life. It was the night she was touched by a higher power while playing a video game."
(http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1992/constructing_artificial_emotions_.php)

The original essay is an admittedly difficult read, but I recommend revisiting it. In short, psychological experiments show that by intentionally mixing physical states of excitement with the appropriate context a designer can concoct emotional responses that are indistinguishable from naturally occurring emotions. The design techniques described within are no longer futuristic daydreaming. A basic form of Bacchus could be made in the next few years.

In the past games have been limited in the types of responses they can evoke in players because the range of human activities that we could model and reward were limited. We've admittedly designed amazing experiences that only rely on the limited ability to press a button. However, a cursory inventory of the human body and mind is surprisingly more comprehensive than a twitching thumb. We can move our amazing and capable bodies, we can engage in complex social interactions, we can become excited or depressed. All these basic elements of our humanity have been outside the realm of game design because we could not track them, build models around them or reward desired behaviors.

Now we can.

With these new tools and a mass market that embraces them, we have a vast laboratory of millions of players. Early mini-games will act as experiments in the engineering of human emotions. Initially, we'll focus on found fun since that is what our audience is currently trained to consume. With time and enough experiments, we'll begin to notice that with the ability to manipulate body, mind, social context and excitement level, we gain the ability to evoke deeply meaningful emotions. Imagine visceral sorrow, lust, anger, happiness, cruelty, generosity, stress and contentedness. All the emotions reproducibly evoked in psychology lab experiments become our creative palette.

Every game becomes a reality television show starring the player.

Every game designers becomes pragmatic engineers of the player's emotional experience, dissecting and reconstructing the ephemeral moments of human nature. Our games turn into intricate systems of hardware and software that play players like a willful instrument.

Hardware like Natal, MotionPlus, Sony's wands and the Vitality Sensor are really just the beginning. There is an entirely new class of middleware that tracks the torrent of new sensor information and teases out useful patterns of human behavior. Fresh emotional game mechanics that are as new to the world as moving objects in Spacewar! must to be invented from whole cloth. There is great work to be done.

Once again, I'm reminded what an exciting time it is to be a game developer.

take care

Danc.

Bunni Sneak Peek

2009-04-26T15:59:00.007-06:00

I had an immensely good time collaborating with Andre on Fishing Girl earlier this year. He was looking for a new project and so we started idly chatting about random ideas. One thing led to another and he is now nearing the finish line on a new Flash game called Bunni. I thought Andre might enjoy a little bit of public encouragement as he enters the final stretch.

I've been wracking my brain and I don't know of another game out there that is quite like Bunni. Imagine if Animal Crossing had a long lost mutant sibling that coalesced out of a creative flurry in a mere four months. There is no clever twist on shooting, block stacking, or 2D platforming. It is not an innovative music game. Nor does it involve playing with time or bizarro spacial dimensions. If there are any puzzles, I apologize since they weren't intentional. In fact, it isn't a very hard game. I've yet to find a single hidden object, probably because there aren't any. Despite lacking all these critical things, play tests end up lasting for hours.

I don't want to give away too much about the game, but I can share a single, mildly cluttered screen shot. Yes, that is a pirate bunni. And no you can't have one unless you are very, very special.

Bunni: First Screenshot. Likely to change in inexplicable ways.

Oh, and as a bonus, here are some t-shirt designs. Let me know which ones you like the best. (I tossed together a storefront as well just for fun. The internet is so awesome.)

Broken Hearted

Bounce

In Love

Long road to love

take care

Danc.

Danc's Miraculously Flexible Game Prototyping Graphics for Small Worlds

2009-03-14T23:36:00.006-06:00

Don't you think it is time for some new free graphics?

The originals
The original set of miraculously flexible prototyping graphics have been out there for a couple of years now. In that time, they've been used in mini-MMO's, shooters, RPGs, platformers and dozens of various projects that lurk in the dark squishy nooks of the ever fermenting, communal indie mash.

However, they had some issues.

They were in a format that wasn't readily accessible to most users. In particular Flash games didn't make as wide a use of them as I would have liked.
They required a rather tricky placement system that most tile based engines had difficulty handling.
Very few games used the shadows system and without the shadows, they tend not to look very good.

There were also a couple other areas I wanted to explore.

HD pixel art: There is an emerging artistic style that showed you could keep the intricate iconic style found in pixel art, but modernize it in such a way to take advantage of the crispness found in modern high resolution displays. The result found in games like Pixel Junk Monsters, Patapon, and Loco Rocco is distinctly game art. It tends to be 2D and highly evocative. But is also is information dense and full of distinct iconic symbols that have meaning during game play. When there is a trade off between realism and functionality, functionality wins.
Vector art: I've done immense amounts of raster art over the years, but lately I've been playing with more vector art. The tools have gotten to the point where you can do some pretty nice stuff rather rapidly without needing to ever go to bitmaps. They are rendered natively in Flash or Silverlight and you can play with scaling without worrying about loss of detail.
Arbitrary placement: Once upon a time, you needed to use little square tiles for everything. Nowadays, there is no real need to make a tile based 2D engine. With arbitrary images with full alpha and lots of fill rate, you can put together a game like a sticker book. Drop down your graphics at arbitrary positions and layer like a madman. Games like Aquaria look great and tiles are nowhere to be seen. There's a good tutorial on the topic here: http://gametuto.com/in-game-c-map-editor-tutorial-with-indielib-engine-that-dosent-use-tiles-but-pieced-images-like-in-braid-or-aquaria-games/

Small World

So I started a new graphics set that took all these into account. The theme I chose was the 'Small World', an intimate place of green trees and blue ocean seen from above. For ages I've been fascinated by tiny worlds that you could imagine keeping like a bonsai garden on a table top.

What types of games can the Small World graphics be used for?

Turn-based strategy games
Real time strategy games
RPG's
God and Sim games
Tower defense (the original inspiration for this set was Pixel Junk Monsters)
Crazy innovative games that will shock and amaze the world.

What does the set include?

70 high quality sprites
The original Illustrator CS4 .AI file
The exported Flash CS4 .FLA file
The exported Flash CS3 .FLA file
The exported Flash 10 .SWF file (with linkages)
Land
Forests
Buildings
Dialogs and buttons

Having the source files allows you to easily manipulate and edit the graphics so you can make variations or combine pieces together. You should have enough pieces to easily prototype attractive little worlds full of forests, fields and cities.

What doesn't this set include?

I have some characters that fit this set, but those will be coming along at a later point.
I haven't had time to cut out all the bitmaps. This is coming shortly unless someone else cuts them out first.
Other formats: In general there are a billion minor formats that all have their passionate proponents. Convert at will. :-)

The License
Much of the email I get involves questions about how various graphics can be used. Though I love hearing from you, it has become apparent that the license needs to be clarified so that I can spend more time making stuff for you and less time writing back about the legal issues.

A second issue is that there have been some unfortunate incidents where players have taken talented developers publicy to task for 'stealing' my artwork or 'copying' game designs. 'Open source game designs' are admittedly a cutting edge concept in our IP-clutching world, so there is some education to be done.

As of today, I've created a separate Lost Garden Licensing page that outlines the license for these graphics. If you plan on using these graphics, be sure to read it. The basics are that they are free to use in both commercial and hobby projects under a standard Creative Commons Attribution license.

The goods
So what are you waiting for?

SmallWorld Graphics.zip
Lost Garden License: Read here for licensing details

I'll be releasing some prototyping challenges that make use of these graphics in the future, but for now just have fun and give them a shot. They were a blast to make.

take care
Danc.

PS: I also included graphics that allow you to make arbitrarily sized islands composed of splotches of land stuck together. This is a tricky technique that only advanced users will undertake. First lay down the water. Then lay down all the Land-Bottom graphics. Then lay down all the Land-Mid graphics. Finally draw all the Land-Top graphics. By layering the graphics in this order, you can create islands that merge together visually.

Game design in 2020

2009-03-09T14:41:00.004-06:00

My short essay on future games was selected to be part of the recent Gamasutra 'Games of 2020' feature. The treatment is tongue in cheek and I owe anyone I photoshopped a free beer.

You can read the whole thing here:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3957/games_of_2020__the_winners.php?page=5

The result of all this is that I am now able to attend this year's GDC. If anyone wants to meet up in San Franciso (March 23rd to March 27th), drop me a note at danc [at] lostgarden [dot] com.

take care

Danc.

What is your game design style?

2009-03-01T22:38:00.011-07:00

I was about to ask a friend what sort of games she liked to make and I realized that I didn't even know how to frame that question in an intelligent manner. I've noticed that games have distinct styles. These are not visual styles. Nor are they styles associated with prefered process of development. Instead, they are unique styles of game design, how you mix and match mechanics, story, player agency and feedback. What do you emphasize? What aspects of the the player's experience do you highlight with your design choices?

A spectrum of game design styles
It is a broad topic, so I'll just jump right in. Here are some styles that I've noticed. You can think of these categories as pieces of a spectrum that cover all major aspects of the final game design that the player experiences. Though they are all present, each style is emphasized to varying degrees in a particular title.

Copycat: make a game like another game that is interesting.
Experience: Make a distinct moment of game play that looks and feels interesting.
Narrative: Make a story that is interesting
World: Make a place or world that is interesting
Systems: Make systems and objects that are interesting.
Player Skills: Make verbs for the player that are interesting.

Let's give a brief description of each of these styles and how I've seen them work.

Copycat

A copycat designer takes an existing game genre and builds a new work within it. The term 'copycat' is descriptive and not derisive. I personally steal with great gusto from other games and consider an elegantly pulled off theft to be an essential skill for any practicing designer.

Copycats borrow liberally from the best elements of past works and mix them together with minor design innovations to create the new flavor of the month.
If design problems arise, a good solution is often readily available in a historical product in the same genre. The best copycat designers have encyclopedic knowledge of other games in their genre.
The goal is almost always to make something better or 'more correct' than what has been on the market previously.

Most working designers are copycat designers. On the supply side, there exists a natural urge for a player who deeply loves a particular genre to attempt to do a better job. This provides a constant wellspring of new copycat designers. On the demand side, the market's lust for sequels ensures a wide range of jobs that need good copycat designs. Helping this dynamic is the fact that it is quite easy to learn to be a copycat designer. Find a game you like and copy it. You don't need to know theory or have a strong philosophy of design. Over many years of labor you'll likely get quite good at making polished variations on the initial blueprint.

Limitations

Competition is intense. Most of the time you are fighting over market share in a crowded genre. You can avoid the competition by building a strong established brand (which costs lots of money) or you can be first to a popular new platform (which requires technical resources and the ability to predict future markets)
Costs are high. All the polish required results in long development cycles with large teams and large marketing budgets.
Risk aversion dominates: Both copycat players and developers are risk averse. Players want their comfortable fix and developers don't want to introduce undue design risk in an already financially risky project. This often leads to bigger titles that are not always better.

Experience

An experience designer has a vision in their head of how the game will eventually look, feel and sound. They seek to create an emotional moment for the player that matches their vision.

Experience designers start with a mental image of the game. It could be a still shot. It could be a scene. The scene is laden with strong emotional and evocative detail.
Everything in the game exists to serve and bring to life that vision.

When I think of games that demonstrate the Experience style, I immediately think of Flow and Flower. Graveyard is also a good example. Starting with a target experience has a lot of benefits. You can change your art, mechanics, story and other game elements to match the experience. Experience designs have the added benefit of making the original designer valuable and nearly irreplaceable. The vision resides primarily in their head and they can act as the final arbiter of whether or not the actual product meets their vision.

Limitations:

Designs based on a vision are difficult to communicate. On larger teams, communication mistakes can multiply and bog down the project.
Teams can wander down dozens of different paths and still not reach the ephemeral vision in the designer's noggin.
Occasionally other game play elements are poorly fleshed out. You can easily end up with something that is pretty, but isn't all that fun to play.

Narrative

A story designer has a tale, usually a linear sequence of evocative events (or graph of such events), that they wish to tell. Games are the stage upon which the story is performed.

The game is conceived as a narrative arc and gameplay is often relegated to mini-game set pieces strung together to support the creation of the arc.
Design efforts focus on the use of symbols and pacing to evoke emotion. When the designer kills or removes a character and there is nothing the player could have done, you know you are dealing with a Story Designer.
The game is a success if players react strongly to the story that has been woven for them over the course of their play.

Story designers are quite common in larger scale games. Many AAA titles sports a very specific 'roller coaster ride' structure that has narrative design at it's heart. Examples of games built by Story Designers are everywhere. Choose your own adventures are the classic case, but I'd be curious if even a game like Passage was ultimately conceived as a tale with fixed endings (albeit one where authorial intent was enforced by a predestined algorithm).

Limitations

Most story-based games can only be played once or twice before they are no longer interesting. They deliver their tale and then their value is spent.
Every little bit of must-see narrative steals a smidgen of agency away from the player. Instead of letting the player author their own story, the designer steps in and forces their own narrative upon the player. This limits the player's ability to try and learn new things.
Failure is rarely an option, or at least not a serious one. After all, there is a story that must be told. Many times players are shunted from plot point to plot point with minimal gaming fuss.

World

A world designer begins by envisioning an imaginary space. They picture how it might be if they escaped into it as a player.

Place is a critical organizing concept. Items, people, organizations lives in specific places and their spatial relationships give meaning to the world. It is quite common for world designers to think in terms of maps, architecture, towns, races, guilds, districts etc.
Much of the flavor of the place is created through the use of historical detail. The underlying assumption is that the world existed when the player was gone and it will exist when the player leaves.
World designer will often lean heavily on fresh content in the form of new vistas to create a sensation of being in the world. They will often use the same game mechanics throughout, but delight the player by varying the setting from location to location.

The classic example of a World Designer is found in the paper RPG world. A GM will start with a map of continents and flesh out civilizations, races and alliances. This creates a playground for imaginative adventures. Games like Ultima, Oblivion and World of Warcraft also have a strong World style.

Limitations

World designs can often result in bloated games. There is so much stuff in the ever evolving world in your head that it is hard to know when to stop adding. New systems and verbs are created to support the exploration of every nook and cranny and few mechanics interconnect in crisp manner.
World designs are usually an immense amount of work. It is far easier to make a single scene or a situation than it is to flesh out an entire world.
Designers can focus so much on building the space that they forget to fill it with interesting things for the player to do. The result is mechanical place that feels lifeless.

Systems

Systems designers begin with a curious and intriguing set of rules that interact in unexpected ways.

Designs often begin with a set of objects, properties and interesting ways that the objects interact.
Common sources of inspiration include probability, combinatorics, spacial relationships, physics, timing and economic game theory.
The goal is to create a challenge for the player, be it a short term challenge in the form of a puzzle or a long term challenge in the form of a deep possibility space.
Truly deep systems often lay bare their mechanics in order to provide advanced players with absolutely clarity on their inner workings. The result is less room for details like narrative or world building.

Many of the industry's most original forms of gameplay were conceived by people inspired by systems. With simpler rule sets, you find games like Tetris. Complex systems yield creations like SimCity or Populous.

Limitations

You'll often end up with a system that is fascinating to the designer, but not that enjoyable to the player.
Many systems oriented designs come across to players as overly abstract. There isn't a clear entry point into the design for new users in the form of a friendly metaphor or setting.
Systems can be quite difficult to balance due to all the various emergent interactions.

Player skills

Designers that focus on player skills create a set of actions (or 'verbs' in Chris Crawford lingo) for the player to perform. Then they create systems that help them learn those skills.

You start by writing out the type of verbs that you want the player to perform.
Then you figure out systems to go with those verbs
You figure out what additional skills are discovered when the systems are put in front of players.
Finally you figure out the right feedback systems to teach people those skills in an enjoyable manner.

Miyamoto is a good example of a designer inspired by player actions. When developing games he tends to focus on what the player is doing. Mario was originally named Jumpman after the key action you performed in the game. WiiFit came about by asking what sort of game could be built around the joy of weighing yourself. Mario 64 started as a playtest bed where all you could do is run around a small room and exercise the basic verbs of the game.

Limitations

Game play occasionally devolves into a series of disconnected mini-games when designers grab the easiest system available to represent a particular action. For example, in FishingGirl, I used a Frogger-style mechanic to represent fishing. As a simulation it was quite limited and was barely connected to the other mini-games associated with of casting and purchasing lures. In something like God of War, they turn the action "Kill boss monster" into the simplistic mini-game "Simon".
After coming up with a set of fun actions, narrative and world are applied as a skin to the results. The result are surreal worlds involving mushrooms, exploding barrel graphics and other videogame-isms.

Rising design styles
The following styles are starting to appear within a few pockets of game design community.

Social: Designers that focus on encouraging particular types of interactions between multiple people. They have skills of event coordinators or party planners and focus on atmosphere, breaking the ice, moving people from activity to activity as well as efficient build up and take down of the event. Important organizing concepts include 'Events' and 'Social spaces'. MMOs, Party games, and social networking games tend to attract Social designers. It is my believe that the next generation of great designers will be social designers.

Business: Design that focus on business try to squeeze as much money out of players as possible. I meet designers operating in online games and gambling games with this design slant. Typically, you encounter it in ex-designers who have moved onto publishing roles. It is an extremely powerful perspective that is unfortunately rather rare. As free-to-play becomes more popular, gameplay and business model will become even more interwoven.

Product Utility: Designers that focus on player value first identifies some form of utility that the product bring to the player. Product Utility designers often come from a more traditional product design background and focus on creating innovative solutions to observed problems. Yahoo, Amazon, Iminlikewithyou, and numerous web 2.0 companies a busy using the motivational aspects of games for utilitarian purposes. In short, this is social engineering with a purpose.

Pick your style!

Most designers tend to mix a couple major styles together. For example someone who enjoys working on licenses might start with a world style and do a deep dive to understand the world of the license. Then they augment that with a copycat design. Or someone who works on art games could mix a strong narrative with a systems oriented set of mechanics.

My suspicion is that most designers will have trouble applying all these styles to a game equally. First, each style can easily take years of intense labor to master. Secondly, games need focus in order to clearly convey their intended value. Too many dominant ingredients fighting for the player's time can weaken the end result. It is a bit like cooking. :-)

As an exercise, take a look at various games out on the market and see if you can figure out the handful of styles they've stirred together. Halo is classic Copycat with a heavy coating of Narrative to make it seem like something bigger than your typical game. Desktop Tower Defense a straight Verb and System game, barely seasoned with any other styles. Ian Bogost refers to Jason Rohrer's work at 'Proceduralism'. I see a fascinating mix of Narrative and System styles.

So pick two or three styles for each game you build. Prioritize one as primary and others as secondary (in case there is a conflict at some point later in the design.) Don't ignore the remaining styles since you'll certainly need dashes of them to make the game function. However, be conscious of the dominant style of game you are making and make the hard decisions on what to focus on up front.

Understanding design styles to reduce team conflict
Inevitably there will be people on your team or in your audience who are fans of the other styles of game design. I regularly run into good people working in the game industry who passionately want to tell the sort of emotional stories that they see in movies. Story and Experience are paramount to them. However, any sort of Systems conversation inevitably devolves into a muddled Copycat discussion.

You can use the game design styles above much like how personality tests are used to resolve conflicts between people with different work styles.

Identify your personal style. Which of those styles above do you love? Which ones do you find dull or unpleasant?
Identify the style of the game you are working on right now. It is very common for this to be something different than your personal style. Publicly declare the style of game you are making so the entire team can agree upon the game's direction.
See if you can understand the preferred style of other people around you that tend to hold forth passionately on game design.
Realize that having people on the team who are passionate about a variety of different styles is a good thing. Just because you occasionally feel the other person is coming from a bizarre and alien perspective doesn't mean that they don't have something valuable to contribute.
When the opportunity comes to up to add in a dash of 'spice' in an area outside your personal style, see if you can tap into the passion of someone who prefers that style. We can't lead all the time in all areas, nor is it a good idea to try.

My style
I almost always approach a new design from a Systems perspective. I find an interesting set of objects that interact with one another in interesting ways and then attempt to build a game around it. My typical process is to try lots and lots of systems, throw them at kleenex testers and see which ones are 'fun'. This is labor intensive, but you can keep the costs down by using small agile teams and simple prototypes. It yields games that are lower on the copycat factor. However, they also have a bit of a surreal aspect to them since experience, story and world tend to be re-imagined on the spot to fit the latest mechanics.

Lately, I've been moving more in the direction of a Verb style. With Systems, I'll often end up creating a game that is fun to design, but not fun to play. By focusing on the verbs and how the systems help the player learn to manipulate the system, my prototypes "find the fun" more often. If games create pleasure through exploratory learning, it makes sense that focusing on verbs and skills are one of the more direct paths towards creating engaging game play.

Narrative is my main weak point and something I should work on.

Conclusion
One thing I get out of this exercise is that there is not one True style of game design. For every Miyamoto and Will Wright creation there is a game like Monkey Island or Full Throttle pushing story and experience. People love all these games. Game design style, like style in almost any consumer market is a matter of taste. The good news is that now I can name the various styles and discuss them in a less vague fashion.

I also realize that I've been leaving certain powerful perspectives out of my palette of game design tools. When I was younger (and driven more strongly by raging hormones), experience-driven games mattered immensely. I vividly remember working on a game about sickness and trying to convince my fellow teammates that it was of utmost importance that black cancerous growths fall off the player and scuttle away on their own. As I aged, I've moved onto more intellectual and less emotional designs. It might be fun to bring that side of my design back one day.

Of course, this list of game design styles is a work in progress. So I'll end with some questions.

What style of game designer are you? Do you fit into one of these approaches?
Is there another design style that is missing from this list? Can it be expressed by a combination of the other styles?

Take care,

Danc.

Review of "The Art of Game Design" by Jesse Schell

2009-02-19T14:56:00.005-07:00

Recently I wrote a review for Jesse Schell's new game design book. You can read it up on Gamasutra.

Here's a brief except:

Though the elements of game design are well described, practicing designers won't find a lot of new insights that haven't been covered elsewhere. Luckily, the book also includes some more utilitarian tools in the form of 100 "lenses", or questions that help you iterate on your current design.

A designer's job often consists of asking questions. Almost as soon as you start building a game, you need to ask "what should be improved?" There are nearly an infinite number of questions one could ask and often finding the right question to ask is key to coming up with the right solution.

The 100 Lenses are a set of time-tested questions that you can ask about your game. Are you using your elements elegantly? Could your pacing be made a bit more interesting by using interest curves? What is the balance of long term and short term goals for the player? One of my favorites is Lens #69, The Lens of the Weirdest Thing:

"Having weird things in your story can help give meaning to unusual game mechanics -- it can capture the interest of the player, and it can make your world seem special. Too many things that are too weird, though, will render your story puzzling and inaccessible. To make sure your story is the good kind of weird, ask yourself these questions:

What's the weirdest thing in my story?
How can I make sure that the weirdest thing doesn't confuse or alienate the player?
If there are multiple weird things, should I maybe get rid of, or coalesce some of them?
If there is nothing weird in my story, is the story still interesting?"
These are the sort of questions that get me looking at my game designs from a new perspective and can really jolt the creative juices. Not all of the questions will be useful.
However, somewhere in the list are at least two or three questions that even the most experienced designer wished they had asked sooner. By having the questions at your fingertips, you can ask them earlier.

Thoughtful writing on game design always get my brain churning in interesting new directions. With Jesse's book, I was reminded what a broad ranges of disciplines that game design ultimately includes. I have taken a narrower route and spent the last couple of years focused on a rather specific set of tools related to rapid iteration and skill atoms. Yet there are dozens of fascinating nooks and crevices in our evolving craft that one could profitably invest their life exploring.

take care
Danc.

Project Horseshoe: Multiplayer Game Atoms

2009-02-12T15:54:00.005-07:00

The 2008 Project Horseshoe reports are up! We wrote about how to diagram multiplayer games using skill atoms. Truly a brilliant weekend. The discussion was quite wide ranging and as a result the write up became a bit...long. However, the results should spark a few brain cells. Let me know what you think! :-)

http://www.projecthorseshoe.com/ph08/ph08r5.htm

Best wishes,

Danc.

PS: There are some great reports up this year so be sure to browse around a bit.

Fishing Girl Prototype results

2008-12-20T20:22:00.005-07:00

Here is a story about a fellow named Andre, who created a Lostgarden game prototype, sold it for $4000 and started down the path to a new career in game development.

Andre lives down in a rural section of Australia. Due to the limited infrastructure in the region, he makes due with a gimpy modem that sputters along, randomly disconnecting at the worst possible moment. There aren’t very many tech jobs in the area, but he is unable to move due to family obligations.

Early on in life he dabbled with art, graphics programming and games, but there isn’t much call for such things locally. To make ends meet, he grinds away, year after year, developing website after website.

Andre is the sort of smart, industrious fellow that has immense potential. He dreams of creating amazing and wonderful games. Every email I receive from him is bursting with ideas and
snippets of working games that he jotted down in his spare time. Yet the ‘traditional’ path into games is closed to him.

When opportunities are limited, people often settle for limited opportunities. I grew up in a rural area and I’ve seen many bright wonderful people end up in dead end jobs due to the emptiness of their environment. It can be hard for people raised in areas of plenty to understand, but if no one else ever talks about what is possible or open a door to new ideas, you can go through life bound by invisible cultural blinders.

Prototyping challenges are opportunities
I created the prototyping challenges on Lostgarden.com as an onramp for new game developers. There are no excuses. The art is free. The design, though never perfect, is enough to get you moving in the right direction. There are dozens of free game engines for you to use. All this, combined with the internet (even accessed on a gimpy modem) opens all sorts of doors. All you need to do is make a game.

Over the past month or so, Andre built a version of Fishing Girl in Flash. He quickly built out the original design and then iterated upon it until he had something playable. A bit of data:

My wife played it and she likes it. It passed the Wife Test.
Played by about 280,000 people...100,000 in the last day.
Rating on New Grounds: 4.1 out of 5
JayIsGames has a review up at http://jayisgames.com/archives/2008/12/fishing_girl.php

The best bit of news is that Andre was able to sell the Fishing Girl game for $4000 + a performance bonus. Yes, you can sell Lostgarden prototyping challenges for cold cash. I highly encourage it since A) people should be paid for their hard work and B) the lessons you learn by finishing a game for the public are invaluable.

Now Andre has a little bit of income and a lot of validation to feed the development of his next game. These days when I talk to Andre, he has big plans for a whole career doing what he loves. That is pretty darned cool.

Gold medal (1st ever)

Andre gets my first gold prototyping award. He earned a score of 77% (103 out of 134 points). Here is what he did to earn it:

15 minutes of fun: The rule of thumb for a gold medal game is that you need to make about 15 minutes of fun. Most prototypes barely get to the 5 minute mark. Many people are playing through Andre’s FishingGirl twice and spending upwards of an hour on a single play through.
Found and extended the fun in the design: In order to build 15 minutes of fun, he iterated on the basic design and added his own touches like lure-seeking fish and wonderfully animated endings.He realized that a game design is not a blue print. It is a starting point for practicing the iterative process of design.
Made a complete experience: There is a strong narrative arc throughout Andre’s Fishing Girl. You fish, you advance, you discover something surprising and you save the little boy. It is a game you can start and then feel good about finishing. The vast majority of people who say they want to make games start building them but never finish them. The act of making a polished game that players can finish teaches you more about game design than any number of incomplete engines or piles of features.

Silver medals
Folks have been working away like busy bees on this design. I expected to give out mostly bronze medals, but there were three prototypes that were recently updated, each of which kept me interested for five minutes.

There is still opportunity for each of these to reach for a gold medal. I’d love to see some more variations on the Fishing Girl game. If Andre’s Fishing Girl is the equivalent of Asteroids, who is going to make Galaga?

Eric (65%): http://ericw.ca/files/FishingGirl/setup.exe. A great last minute entry that has delightful Fish AI and an innovative combo system for catching fish.
Ben (46%): http://sites.google.com/site/walkersoftwareprojects/files. Ben has a simple game here that still managed to get me to try to fish up all the little fishies. The mechanics are lacking a bit of juiciness, but basics are there.
Shade (41%): http://www.exodia.org/og/?p=24. Shade has some interesting line physics here. To riff a bit , with this type of system and line collision, you could do some wonderful things with obstacles in the sea. Players would need to drape the line perfectly over different objects to get to a particular spot in the ocean to catch a rare fish. This protoype has the ‘juiciest’ of the game mechanics, but it needs a bit of tuning so that it doesn’t feel quite so loose.

Bronze medals
There were also a couple of solid technology experiments.

Dale and Greg: http://beta.sharendipity.com/assets/1900/: The good folks over at Sharendipity put together the basic fishing mechanics and it is running on their new Flash client. (Woot!) They initially implemented casting and fish swimming as two separate apps. As a side note, this prototyping path can be tricky to gain useful feedback from since the most exciting gameplay opportunities often come from the interaction of the combined systems. It is often better to integrate early, but keep each system simple so that you don’t need to deal with undue complexity. You can always add complexity to a system if you identify enjoyable skills that are worth investing further in.
Pete: http://blois.us/FishingGirl/ Our first prototype in Silverlight. Sweetness. He has a tight casting mechanism.

Areas of improvement
Every time you build a game, you learn lessons that let you build it better the next time. If anyone wants to create a better version of Fishing Girl, here are a couple things you might be able to improve. These comments uses Andre’s game as a starting point.

Problems: The following are problems that kept users from enjoying the game fully.

The floating shops are a pain: You constantly end up hitting them with your lure. Having a single floating store that is inside the distance of your longest cast may help. The position prevents you from hitting it unless you try. Instead of selling one item, the store would have a rotating list of things that you can buy. Once you hit the store, it reappears elsewhere. The alternative is to let the player go to the store at any point, but this removes some of the fun of trying to cast at a specific distance.
It is hard to aim exactly with the rod: Slowing down the rod might be one way of improving accuracy. Speeding up the ‘boring’ parts of the swing the beginning and end might be another way of giving the casting a better feel.
Less repetitive music: People get bored of the music rather quickly.
The later portions of the game become boring: Try having fish reproduce at a certain rate if they get below a certain population threshold or make the larger fish more interesting to catch. I’d still like to keep the possibility of ‘fishing out’ the area so that an extinction ending is possible.

Opportunities: The following are glimmers of fun that could be accentuated in a future version.

There should be more things in the ocean: There is immense opportunity for bonus objects to be hidden in the ocean. For example: Treasure chests, Glowing orbs that spawn rare fish or deadly fish, Temporary lure or rod power ups that only last a certain amount of time
A fish collection: Imagine that every time you collected a new fish, you got a stamp for that fish in a collection album. It is a like butterfly collecting, except with fish. Some people would need to “catch ‘em all’ which would extend gameplay. With a bit of color cycling or special effects, you could easily create dozens of different fish with different costs and rarities.
More fish movement: The fish have generally simplistic movement. Fish that dart at a lure or that move very quickly or very slowly might add some interesting texture. It is worthwhile to see if the catching of a single large fish can be made more interesting.
More lure types: The types of lure could be expanded up on. For example: Lures that only work on fish of particular colors, Lures that are more or less bite resistant, Lures that attract some fish and repel others. , Lures that upgrade some fish into more valuable fish, Lures that allow you to capture multiple fish or a set of fish in a row.
More levels: There is a single level. It could be interesting to have the girl jump on a boat and travel to a new island with more fish. An alternative progression is for the sea to evolve over time. Once you collect certain fish or reach a certain amount of money, kelp can slide aside or a cave entrance can be blown up that introduces new fish and new treasure.
Fog of war: One of the exciting bits of fun that emerged from the prototyping was a sense of discovery as you are able to fish out further and further. A feature that should add even more mystery to game is fog of war system similar to those found in RTS games. The area around the lure could show you the fish nearby. Areas that you hadn’t explored would be opaque. Areas that you had explored would show markers or partially transparent versions of fish you had seen. Combined with ‘rare’ fish that could only be found in certain areas, this would give players a much stronger sense of ‘exploring’ the ocean.
Add a serious ending: One of the key endings in the original design is the ability to cause all the fish to become extinct. It adds an interesting twist to what would otherwise be a mindless game. The system is built so that users slowly fish out the small fish and eventually gain new technology that allows them to fish out the larger deeper fish. This systems-based narrative parallels the pattern of fishing in the real world and seeks to teach a small lesson. The dynamics could be augmented by systems that catch large numbers of fish at once so that it becomes quite easy to overfish. The addition of a ‘save’ system that lets you come back later to harvest fish (and score) for long periods of time would encourage manageable fishing tactics.

Conclusion
I hope everyone enjoyed this prototyping challenge. These challenges are evergreen, so just because I’ve given out the first round of awards doesn’t mean you should stop developing! Keep going. I would like nothing better than to give out another gold medal. If you update your project and want me to take a look, just drop me an email at danc[at]lostgarden.com. I can be a bit slow at responding, but I will write eventually.

As the years go past and my hairline continues to recede, I find that I have a debt that I am obligated to pay back. Very few of the current generation of game developers started from scratch. We’ve all looked at tutorials or snagged bits of free code. We’ve built upon tools like Flash or engines like Quake or Source. We’ve been inspired by existing designs or read books that have opened our eyes. Once upon a time, I too was in Andre’s shoes and it was only due to the opening of an unexpected opportunity that I’ve arrived at where I’m at today. If these prototype challenges ease another eager game developer’s path in even a small way then my time on this blog is well spent.

Happy holidays. Go make some great games!
Danc.

References and notes

The original FishingGirl challenge: http://lostgarden.com/2008/11/fishing-girl-game-prototyping-challenge.html
Percentage values: The percentage scores may come across as somewhat low, but try not to interpret them from perspective of the inflated grading system used in schools.
Notes on Awards: If you won an award, feel free to post the appropriate award image and link back to this post. You should be proud of your efforts!
Scoring spreadsheet: Fishing%20Girl%20Results.xlsx. Here is how entries were scored.

Post-it note design docs

2008-12-06T00:53:00.009-07:00

I happen to fall into the artist-designer skill set, so I often find myself trying to prototype ideas on teams rich with programmers. As such, I'm always looking for better game development techniques that work well for this particular team mix.

Here is a very lightweight prototyping process using Post-it notes that I quite enjoy.

Initial idea: I sit down with an available programmer (and artist/UI designer depending on the system) and we chat about how to test out a new bit of gameplay. Usually this is an idea that has been bubbling about since the night or week before.
Post-it note design: I jot down a quick bulleted list summarizing our discussion on a single post-it note. We go over it one last time so there everything is clear. The list isn't very detailed. Mostly it serves as something to jog our memories if we forget what we were talking about.
Build it: The programmer and artist go off and build the items on the list. It might take 2 hours or two days. They are encouraged to solve problems creatively and they can always just give me a shout if something doesn't make sense.
Play test: When most of the items on the Post-it note are playable, I get called over and we play test it the experiment together. If the results are comprehensible by mere humans, we pull in some play testers for 3-4 minutes to observe some real players interacting with the mechanic for the first time.
Review: Afterwards, we discuss our observations and write up another Post-it note worth of improvements.
Repeat or Stop?: The process repeats until we run out of time or give up. Sometimes we give ourselves a day per experiment, sometimes two days. In the land of Scrum, we treat the experiment like a time boxed task.
Rate: At the end, the gameplay experiment is rated according the scale below.
Save: The code is saved off, a few choice notes are recorded in a doc containing our 'list of experiments' and we move on. Bits of code, even from failed prototypes, are often reused in future gameplay experiments.

Rating system
The rating system is delightfully crude. The goal is to triage experiments quickly.

"A": These experiments were obviously fun. Players laughed, smiled and generally exhibited the emotions we were looking for. If in doubt, ask "Was this fun? How so?"
"B": These experiments showed a hint of fun if you knew what you were looking for. However, it is going to take more effort to expose the fun in a manner that is visible to the players.
"C": There wasn't any fun. The experiment fails.

A portfolio of fun
One of my favorite aspects of this method is that you end up with a mini-portfolio of game design ideas. Instead of putting all the design risk in a project on one or two unproven mechanic, the team now has a half dozen or more proven bits of fun to build upon. If some don't fit into the game or get abandoned for other reasons, that's alright. You can afford to lose a few and the end product will still be fun. Think of it as designing from a position of plenty.

Contrast this with a prescriptive 'design doc' approach where you are forced to pick, without much evidence, a main mechanics for production. Even for the most experienced designer, 50% to 80% of your 'educated' selections are going to be complete dogs. Every unproven mechanic you polish ends up being a massive drain on your budget and your reputation as a designer. You might hear gentle comments like, "We spent 3 months of dev time on this lump of an idea and it isn't fun?"

It doesn't take very many expensive failures for the project's perceived 'design risk' to blossom to the point where conservative minds seek to kill the project. I think of this as designing from a position of sudden death.

Some basic observations
Here's a quick list of things I've observed when prototyping.

Failed experiments happen a lot. Don't be surprised if C-rated experiments occur 50% to 80% of the time. Everyone on the team has to be aware that not every experiment is going to be a success, but the learning process is still worthwhile.
Designing on your feet is a critical skill: Each consultation and analysis might last only 10 to 20 minutes and you need to leave folks with that all important sticky note filled with impactful, yet inexpensive changes. It pays to have lots of ideas and a deep understanding of game mechanics so you can quickly pull together a list of incisive comments. If you can't, you likely are not suited to be performing the designer role.
Listening matters. The designer doesn't need to come up with all the solutions. Everyone on the team is bright and has great ideas. As a designer, your role is to herd all ideas (yours and others) into something that serves the next step in the prototype.
You need programmers: If there aren't programmers dedicated to prototyping, the prototyping isn't going to happen. You can drop down to paper prototyping, but it usually doesn't prove out many types of mechanics (especially ones involving timing and interfaces.)

Advanced observations
These are some notes that are a bit geekier, but can save you large amounts of pain.

Meta game mechanics are harder to prototype: The systems that link together the various gameplay experiments are harder to playtest. They operate on longer time spans (hours instead of minutes) and often require that the core gameplay is already fun.
Build a meta-game architecture that allows for loose coupling of gameplay experiments: Most successful games have an architecture that allows the team to plug in new bits of fun as they are found. The linear 'level-story-level' pattern used by most FPS is one example. The 'hub with many sub levels" used by Mario 64 is another. Any of these allow you to plug in a new experiment independently of the other gameplay experiments. If you don't have a modular architecture, you run into situations where a fun new system breaks many of the other bits of fun you've already discovered.
Integrating tightly coupled gameplay experiments is a pain: If I independently find a fun new type of weapon and an interesting enemy AI, the combination of the two is often a non-trivial issue. The new weapon many work with an old AI, but be completely useless with the new one. Integration yields a whole new set of experiments. Plan for time to rediscover the fun all over again.

Benefits
There are some interesting benefits to the Post-it note design method:

Scales nicely to large prototyping efforts: One designer can serve multiple programmers. This works nicely on teams where there are more programmers than designers and you need to get a lot of prototyping done quickly.
Failing quickly is fun and educational. You learn a lot with each failure and can move onto the next experiment with a much better idea of what doesn't work.
Provides a quick death for bad pet ideas. It is much harder to resurrect pet ideas when you have concrete, playable proof that it won't work. Finding out early which one of my favorite ideas is idiotic saves me a lot of political pain.
Fun prototypes are quite convincing: A fun, playable crazy idea works a lot better for winning over other team members than any amount of hand waving or documentation.
An easier team to assemble: Finding a competent game designer and a competent programmer can often be easier than finding a competent programmer-designer. Well developed hybrid skill sets are very valuable, but can be quite rare. A side benefit of having a team is that you end up cross training your designers and programmers. You create designers who can speak to programmers and programmers who can riff on some of the design.

The value of dime-a-dozen designs (A brief aside)
One often hears the negative comment that game designs are a dime-a-dozen. And in a waterfall design process, an incessant stream of ideas is indeed a problem. If you attempt to squeeze all those ideas into a typical waterfall development process, you end up with an immense amount of waste. Each designs need documentation, concepting, implementation, testing and bug fixes. In response, project owners will often ask for just one good idea.

There is another path. A lightweight prototyping method takes your flurry of crazy ideas and converts them at moderate cost into a well sorted portfolio of working designs. All those ideas are not, in fact, worthless or wasteful; they are the essential fuel that feeds a good prototyping process. Each idea either teaches you something or provides you with a success.

The way to make the process work without getting gunked up is to make prototyping incredibly lightweight. Other than our focused conversations, I spend my time on a total of two design docs: The first is the brief list of rated prototypes and the second is a set of discardable, temporary Post-it notes. Design waste in the form of unnecessary artifacts is minimal. Most of the 'programming waste' is better classified as low cost learning.

Those wild flocks of churning, swirling ideas end up not being worthless at all. They simply need to be funneled into the project with the right process for their value to be realized.

Conclusion
The "Post-it note design process" has likely been reinvented in one form or another hundreds of times across the history of game development. It is so basic that it feels odd to even write it up in any sort of formal fashion.

If you have a designer and a programmer, give it a shot. It is certainly a good functional alternative to the popular process of sticking a lone programmer-designer in a room and asking them to 'find the fun'. Both can produce great games. Pick the one that works best for your current team composition.

This process does have an cost since you need to devote at least two people to finding the fun instead of putting all decisions on the head of the designer. However, the end result is well worth it. After all, it is far smarter to spend team time uncovering a portfolio of the right mechanics than it is to 'save your programmers' so they can be off running really fast in the wrong direction.

In the end it really isn't about programmers, designers, design documents or features. It is about the team working together to make the right product. Everything else is just ego and waste. And for some reason, it is quite difficult to invest much ego or waste in a little disposable Post-it note.

take care
Danc,
Post-it note fanboy

Tidbits from the garden

2008-11-20T19:45:00.004-07:00

A few odds and ends have collected in my inbox lately.

Video of the Princess Saving Application is up!
All the videos from the night are posted up on OfficeLabs.com. My talk starts 10 minutes into the first video and lasts approximately 30 minutes. There’s also a bit of Q &A after all the talks finish up. You can get the original slides here.

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:d0cabdcc-97bc-4799-a579-4da3b73f865b&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;showPlaylist=true&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Microsoft Office Labs &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp; Engineering Excellence IxDA Event Part I Daniel Cook"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Video: Microsoft Office Labs &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp; Engineering Excellence IxDA Event Part I Daniel Cook&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

FishingGirl update
I’ve seen some sneak peeks of the FishingGirl prototypes and people are making great progress. It will be possible for someone to win a gold medal this time around. If you’ve started a prototype, finish it! There is solid fun lurking in that design and you still have a couple of weeks left to build something wonderful.

Some observations:

The store and the acquisition of the various rods adds a great sense of exploration and progression to the game.
The gameplay improves substantially if you give your fish a small dash of intelligence so that they move towards your lure if it is in their sight.
Making the game winnable. There is a story arc to the game and it feels incomplete if you don't let the player finish.

Skill atoms in action
Tex, over at the delightfully titled Tin Man Tex’s Slap Dang Blog, put together skill chain describing his mod. I liked how he intuitively started writing down skill atoms and then only later began connecting them together in a skill chain. Analyzing a game using skill atoms has an element of mind mapping to it that is pleasantly organic. Check it out. I hope to see more such examples in the future.

http://tinmantex.blogspot.com/2008/11/ill-atomize-your-face.html

Other prototyping notes
BuschnicK created a nicely fleshed out version of Play with your Peas. It is a faithful implementation of the game and deserves a very solid silver reward. However, I still think the fun hasn't been completely uncovered.

At this point, we've had some reasonable implementations of the original concept. I suspect that the design may require some big changes to make it work. So here is a question: Why isn't Play with your Peas mind-thunderingly fun and what could be done to improve it?

http://www.buschnick.net/Personal/2008/09/ninja-peas.shtml

Best wishes and may you have a sinfully glorious Thanksgiving.
Danc.

Project Horseshoe 2008: There and back again

2008-11-10T19:40:00.007-07:00

I’m writing this on the long flight back from Project Horseshoe 2008. The last bittersweet night, we stayed up till five AM playing games and talking about games. The conversation shifted from the slow death of games as we knew them, to fresh games that will change the world, to the little tips we use to thrive each day. There is something distinctly surreal about chatting quietly with such an intimate knowledgeable group during the wee hours of the morning, there on a lonely porch in the uncharted depths of Texas. And yes, there were indeed baby racoons.

This year, I took a risk. If you’ve been following this blog for a bit, you know that I’ve been working on skill atom techniques for modeling gameplay. I’ve written about it. I’ve used it myself. There has even been a talk or two. Yet, aside from a few furtive emails with other happy heretics, I’ve never had a chance to do the following:

Explain the model to a crowd of natural skeptics, working designers who have been successfully building games for years.
Get them to tear it apart.

The cautionary tale of the secret paint formula
I’m reminded of a story that Norman Rockwell used to tell. He once became good friends with a fellow painter who was famous for his rendering of luminescent, sensual skin tones. The painter used a secret formula for his paint and he guarded it jealously from potential imitators. When the painter died, he willed his greatest gift, his secret paint formula to Rockwell.

Rockwell excitedly tried out the formula, but ultimately found it disappointing. The paint was too slick and difficult to control, so he gave up on it and instead fell back on his own preferred techniques. The real secret had never been the paint formula. It was just one little piece of the painter’s vast organic, highly individual process. The real secret was the intuitive wisdom that comes from making a thousand paintings. Sadly, such a thing is not transferable to others. When he died, his specific way of creating paintings died with him.

Are skill atoms the same thing as the secret paint formula? Are they a glossy coat of theoretical hand waving that only works for the people who invented it? Many people I’ve talked with see ‘game grammar’ as nothing more than a time wasting intellectualization of a fundamentally intuitive activity. I went into the weekend with this thought very much at the forefront of my mind.

Why stop there?
If all we had done was validate or invalidate the skill atom model for simple games, it would have been a useful weekend. But by god, this is Project Horseshoe and people are nothing if not psychotically ambitious. To up the ante, our group decided to apply skill atoms to multiplayer games. I’ve never done this.

How do you model a deeply psychological behavior like bluffing? Gifting? Competition? Collaboration? Goodness! I didn’t have a lot of answers prepared for this topic and honestly expected that the skill atom model would immediately collapse under the weight of all the crazy things that happen as soon as you add two or more players to a game design. All it would have taken is one smart designer to raise a single counter example and my fragile model would burst apart, defeated by reality.

Some questions that I had included:

Could we even begin to talk about multiplayer with skill atoms? The alternative is that this is a model that is limited to only single player experiences. That would be like coming up with a model of physics that worked for one ball in a vacuum, but wasn’t useful for something useful like say…building bridges.
Would the system scale to complex systems? Often when you use a diagramming technique (like UML or state diagrams) to understand real world projects, the resulting diagrams becomes so convoluted that the model does more to confuse than to illuminate.
Would the system be useful to designers during every day work? It is much easier to come up with a academic system of analyzing games that works best if you are an ivory tower dweller who can devote hundreds of hours to breaking down each interaction into pretty diagrams filled with obscure invented lingo. However, I’m looking for utilitarian tools that can be applied in that critical 10-minute gap between playing a prototype and deciding what to try next.
Can this system be taught to other designers? Like the secret paint formula, most game models I run across are only useful to their inventors. If I can’t observe other designers applying the model successfully without my intervention there is something horribly wrong with the approach.

We ripped the skill atoms apart. We analyzed multiplayer M.U.L.E. We looked at charades and then took on football and buffing in MMOs. We used skill atoms to prototype a new multiplayer game about gifting using a bag of plastic Indians. At some point, not so long from now, our group will come out with a report. In that report, we’ll be blunt about what we found. What worked? What was flawed? The results are fascinating.

Our team’s report will be one of several reports to come out of Project Horseshoe by groups of game designers just as crazy and inspired as we were. If any one of these reports starts gaining momentum, the world of gaming as we know will change. It turns out that moving our industry forward isn’t about complaining. It is about getting smart people together where they have the time and the space to think. Grab a beer (Aventinus Double Bock, no less), join the mind meld and use the vast pool of centuries (!) of game design experience to come up with real solutions. Then follow up again and again and again.

In that spirit, I can't wait to share our final report with everyone.

Time for some much needed sleep, chock full of dreams.
Danc.

PS: Warm kudos to George, Linda and Teresa for putting Project Horseshoe on. It is obviously a labor of love and is utterly unique compared to the other events and conferences I’ve attended. If you ever get an invite, don’t hesitate to go.

Fishing Girl: Game Prototyping Challenge

2008-11-01T19:09:00.008-06:00

Earlier this summer, I mentioned that I was starting up a Mystery Project for local Seattle weekend coders. Summer has turned into Fall and the Mystery Project is still going strong. So we decided to kick off a Winter session of the Mystery Project!

In this post, I wanted to do two things:

Extend an invitation to any Seattle developers who would like to participate directly in the Mystery Project.
Share some Mystery Project graphics that we’ve made this summer part of yet another delightful Prototyping Challenge.

Winter Mystery Project
The Mystery Project is an innovative small Flash MMO that experiments with many of the design concepts I’ve been writing about on this blog. We meet up every Sunday at a local coffee shop and share what we’ve done and what we’ve learned. The project is the main focus, but I put a big emphasis on helping everyone on the team develop new skills and explore exciting ideas. If you are in Seattle, our meet up has become a rather unique opportunity to explore true next generation game design.

The team is pretty solid, but I’m looking for at least one additional, talented programmer. The project is in Flash/Flex with the server-side game logic written in Java.

Being part of the team means a serious time commitment. Expect to put in at least 10-15 hours a week. Making games needs to be your hobby and your passion.

If you have solid Flash/Flex/Java programming skills and you live around Seattle, drop me a note at danc@lostgarden.com. Ze Mystery Project lives (at least for the winter)!

Fishing Girl Prototype Challenge!
Due to the ‘coffee-shop mentoring’ model I’ve got set up for the Mystery Project, there are dozens of talented programmers who live outside of Seattle who can’t participate in our weekly chats. This makes me sad. So I decided to share some of our graphics as part of a brand spanking new game prototyping challenge. Free graphics + new game prototyping challenge = Happiness.

Fishing Girl is a simple fishing game played with one button. It illustrates a design pattern called sequentially linked mechanics. Often when you try to simulate a complex exercise like fishing, you can’t easily create a single game mechanic that captures the entire experience. Instead, you string together a series of activities. Each activity is simplistic by itself, but in sequence yields a good approximation of the complex experience. The fishing game is split into the following activities:

Casting
Positioning the lure
Hooking a fish
Reeling in the fish
Scoring the fish
Buying new equipment.

Each section should take 1-3 evenings to prototype in Flash. String them all together and you have a fishing game. The nice thing about this challenge is that it is all about bite sized chunks that are easy to build and iterate on.

The Wife Test (How Prototypes are scored)
My wife, as I mentioned in previous posts, is quite ill and I’ve wanted to do something nice for her. She absolutely adores fishing games, so Fishing Girl is designed for her. Any prototypes that someone is kind enough to make will be played by my wife with me watching her reactions intently. Luckily, she doesn’t find this overly irritating. :-)

In order to capture her casual gamer feedback, I’ve added a simple scoring system for this challenge. Each section of the game is worth a number of points. 50% of the score for each section will be whether or not my Bejeweled/WiiFit-playing wife finds the prototype to be ‘fun’. This is Miyamoto’s “Wife Test” applied in a quite literal fashion.

I’ll still be giving out the LostGarden Medals and still, no one has won the epic Gold Medal. It sits out there, tempting and shiny, just waiting for the right prototype to provide 15 minutes of fun. This challenge will last two months. But if something comes in later, I’m always happy to take a look and offer comments. Just list a link to any prototype in the comments section of this post.

The setup (10 points)
The player is a small bear-like creature, the Fishing Girl who sits at the edge of the ocean. She has a fishing pole, a glowing lure on the end of the pole, a money count and that is about it. In the ocean are numerous fish of various sizes that swim back and forth, but we’ll get to those later.

Casting (10 points)
Casting the lure out into the ocean involves two clicks:

If you click your button once, the girl will pull back her pole to cast.
If you do nothing, the pole will return to the default position.
However, if you press a second time in the middle of her swing, she will cast the lure outward into the ocean.
The closer the second click is to the peak of the swing the further the lure travels.
When the lure hits, a number is placed at on spot on the ocean where it lands. This records the distance and lets you know exactly how far you cast.

Casting acts as a simple timing mini-game.

Help text (Bonus!)

Click to start casting
Cast!

Positioning the lure (20 points)

Positioning the lure in the water is the centerpiece of the game. You'll be spending a lot of your prototyping time here. :-)

When the lure hits the water, it starts to sink downward in an arc. When it starts out, it sinks almost straight downward. The tension on the rope pulls it inward towards the player, hence the arc. We don’t have time to model the complex line physics, so instead we say that the lure moves along an arc of a circle whose radius is defined by the distance from the tip of the pole to the point at which the lure hit the water.
Holding down the button reels in the lure. This changes the radius of our arc, but does not change rate at which the lure is moving along the arc.
The empty lure, unencumbered by fish reels in quite quickly. Using this system, we can now place the lure at any point within the sea.

Positioning the lure acts as a timing and spatial skill mini-game.

Hooking a Fish (25 points)
In the ocean there are fish. In order to hook a fish, you must place the lure in front of the fish’s mouth. The fish will lunge forward and become hooked. The entire time, you are carefully timing the slow downward arc of your lure. There are three pieces to this mini-game.

The Fish
The Lunge
The Lure

The Fish (10 points)
Fish are objects in the sea that move back and forth in predictable patterns. Fish come in different sizes, rarity and movement patterns.

Movement: Back and forth. There are others patterns such as circles or swarms, but that would be extra.
Size: Small, Medium, Large, Extra large.
Rarity: Common, uncommon, Rare, Very Rare. This is used during “Scoring the Fish”

Fish are spread throughout the water with more valuable fish located further from shore. Try to have a good mix of big fish and small fish. You can start testing with one fish, but ultimately, you should have 10 to 20 or else the game won’t be very interesting.

The Lunge (10 points)
Now that you have your fish floating about, you can implement catching them.

Each fish has a collision box in front of its mouth.
If the lure enters the collision box, the fish will move forward towards the lure and attempt to become hooked.

The Lure (5 points)
Lures come in different sizes: Small, Medium, Large. The size determines which size fish you can catch:

If the lure is too small, it will be snapped and the cast is over.
If the lure is too big, it will be ignored.
If the lure is just right, the fish will be automatically hooked.

Help Text (Bonus)
We display help text at the appropriate moments

Position lure in front of fish!
That fish was too big for this lure!
That fish was too small for this lure!
You hooked it!
Reel in!

Choosing which fish to hook acts as simple tactical choice where the player is asked to pick the most optimal outcome. The time pressure of the moving fish and lure makes this choice interesting.

Reeling in a fish (20 points)
Once you’ve caught the fish, you need to get it back to the surface. Reeling in the lure works the same as before but the larger the fish, the slower it comes back up. Reeling in the fish is an exercise in keeping your fish away from other, larger fish that will happily eat your fish if it comes their way.

Fish still go for your fish if it appears in front of their mouth.
If they latch on, they take a bite out of your fish.
Three bites and you lose your fish. Each bite also reduces the value of your fish.
If your fish makes it to the surface of the water, you’ve caught the fish!
Reeling in the fish successfully acts as a timing and spatial skill mini-game.

Everything up to this point has been training for the player. Expect to spend considerable time here balancing, iterating and making this section feel good.

Reward for catching the fish. (5 points)
When you catch the fish, a small celebration animation plays that shows you the fish that you caught. There are several pieces to this segment.

Revealing rarity
Awarding Money

Revealing rarity (2 points)
When the fish is held up by the fisherman, the fish that you’ve been reeling in is revealed to be either a common (1), uncommon (2), rare (3) or very rare fish (4). Each type of fish has a distinct image associated with it.

The rarer the fish the less likely it is to appear.
A text label appears that say the name of the fish and the rarity. For example “Ancient Shoefish (Uncommon)”
Bonus!: If you want to get really fancy, you can display a simple text modifier to each fish that also modifies it's value. For example "ancient" increases value by 50% while "skanky" reduces value by 20%.

Awarding money (3 points)

The value of the fish is also displayed. A simple scoring equation might be size * rarity * modifier * 10. Feel free to play with the values to get the right balance.
The amount of money the fish is worth is then added to the piggy bank counter that has been sitting on the screen this entire time.

The revealing of the modifier acts as a gambling element that keeps the outcome interesting of each cast exciting until the very last second.

The store (10 points)
Floating out in the sea are various markers that represent item upgrades. If you hit the marker exactly with your cast and you have enough money, you will purchase them. Otherwise, your lure will bounce off and sink as expected. These artifacts do the following:

Bronze rod: Your basic rod. It casts a short distance off shore.
Silver rod: Cast further
Gold rod: Cast even further
Legendary Rod: Cast far and reel in heavy fish quickly.
Small Lure: Catch small fish.
Medium Lure: Catch medium fish.
Large Lure: Catch large fish. Note that there is no extra large lure, so there are always larger fish that pose as obstacles.
Bomb lure: Explodes and kills the first fish that touches it. Even if it is a very large fish.
Boy: Far on the edge of ocean is a Boy. He is inordinately expensive. This is how you win the game. And for the record, he is indeed, quite the catch. (What happens when you use an explosive lure on the Boy is up to your discretion...perhaps this is another way of winning.)

Bonus: You start with three small lures. When a large fish breaks your line or steals your fish, the lure is lost. At this point, you need to either buy more lures (which are expensive) or stop playing for the day. If you want to get fancy, you have some method of switching between lures. Otherwise, you can simply replace your current item with the most recent acquisition.

The store acts as a simple meta-game that encourages you to keep fishing in order to advance.

Progression (Bonus!)
As you catch more fish, the ocean gets more and more empty. This adds to the difficulty of finding fish. Fish always stay in approximately the same area until caught. Players will note where fish are located and be able to maneuver into position on subsequent casts.

If you wait long enough, more will respawn. If you fish out all the fish, there are no more fish left and you get a simple message “There are no more fish left in the ocean. There will never be any ever again.”

Design notes
The game is about spotting a high value fish, maneuvering your lure into position while avoiding the bigger fish and finally maneuvering your fish back through the landmines of larger fish.

In essence, Fishing Girl is Frogger using a polar coordinate system, a frog that insists on drifting to the left and only the ability to move forward.

Conclusion

So those are the rules! I've created this graphics this time in Illustrator and I've taken pains to make them appealing to Flash developers. Let me know if I've got the formatting right. I'd love to see some Prototypes of Fishing Girl playing in a browser.

So download the graphics and have fun! As with all prototyping challenges, this is a grand exploration of a new play space and there will be all sorts of interesting surprises along the way.

Download Flash Project (.FLA CS3): This is an import from Illustrator into Flash. There are no animations, but this might be useful if you don't have access to Illustrator.
Download Adobe Illustrator (.AI CS3): This has the original artwork. From here you can go to .XAML for Silverlight or bitmap.
Download FishingGirlPNG.zip: Bitmaps versions of all the images used.
Download FishingGirl.swf: A swf export of all the vectors. This is good if you don't have CS3. You may have to dig a little to find what you need, but everything should be in there.

Best of luck! If you are intrigued by these graphics, you'll love what the Mystery Project is turning into.

take care
Danc.

Update 11/1/2008: Added bitmaps and swf of all images.

Lostgarden Podcasts

2008-10-31T00:50:00.004-06:00

Ryan Wiancko over at IndustryBroadcast.com has started recording selected Lostgarden essays. If you find yourself regularly sharing a few spare moments with your tank-like Zune, why not download an essay or two? Ryan's dulcet tones reading riveting game design minutia make for a perfect panacea to downtime boredom.

Or perhaps you know a friend. You know...the sort that never reads any of the mind-boggling important links that you send him (or her) on a Friday afternoon. Now he can put a pause on his 560th listen of Ride the Lightning and instead cultivate a more soothing, perhaps even 'intellectual' pastime. Gently remind him that the world is changing and that one day very soon, perhaps Tuesday, smart people will be again valued. Ryan's site is a magical auditory pill that can reduce his BrainAge to at least 31.

So what are you waiting for? Your iTouch, so jealous of your boss's glittering iPhone, is hungry.

http://industrybroadcast.com/tag/lostgardencom/

take care
Danc.

PS: I've also added a link on the side bar named "Podcasts" in case you need to find the Ryan's site later. He's got all sorts of tasty stuff there from Jamie Fristrom and others. More keeps coming every week. Ryan's on fire!

The Princess Rescuing Application: Slides

2008-10-26T23:11:00.004-06:00

Last Thursday, I gave a talk on game design to the local Seattle chapter of the IxDA, an interaction design group. About 100 folks were in attendance and the catered finger food was downright delicious. Other speakers included George Amaya, who spoke about recent research on social/party games, and Mark Long, CEO of Zombie. Mark gave a lovely presentation on how narrative and storytelling immerse players. His new game looks gorgeous.

My talk was on building an application that rescued princesses. The goal was to give interaction designers some insight into how game design might be applied to the domain of more utilitarian applications. The talk was recorded and should be up sometime this week. When it appears online, I'll link to the video from this post.

Here are my slides both in PDF format and as the original PowerPoint.

The notes fields are heavily annotated with more details about each visual. For those of you who attended, this deck also includes a third section on game design patterns that I didn't have time to cover in the time allotted.

take care
Danc.

Theme and game design

2008-10-04T12:24:00.005-06:00

Recently I was chatting with some friends about the role of 'theme' in game design. Theme, in this discussion, was the setting of the game, be it fantasy, sci-fi, military, etc. At first blush, the typical game designer's use of theme appears a bit primitive.

Limited range compared to the wide variety of themes in movies or books. Games recycle a half dozen major themes or in some cases invent their own surrealist themes that make little sense outside the context of the game. Books, despite being grouped into narrow genres, have explored many thousands of powerful, evocative settings. You have books about bored European manuscript editors exploring the bizarre world of the pseudo occult and you have books set inside the mind of a quadriplegic. The disparity in variety is intriguing.
Crudely applied. Theme is applied in broad strokes at the beginning of many games, but almost always plays second fiddle to interesting game mechanics. Goombas are mushrooms, but this matters little beyond the fact that they are squat, match the scale of the world and can be squashed. If a novelist lazily integrated a character into their book's theme the way that game developer do on a regular basis they would never be published.

The result is that theme is often seen as an interchangable 'skin' that can be applied after the fact to a set of working game mechanics. The task is typically left to marketers to round up a popular license so that it can be painted onto the latest hot collection of game mechanics. This attitude towards theme affects the very fabric of game development.

And yet, something interesting occurs when we work this way. Very few licensed games turn into major long term franchises. They often feel incomplete and the pieces ill matched. On the other hand, seminal 'grown from scratch' games like Bejeweled, Mario, Quake, GTA or Sims end up doing amazingly well. Despite their surreal and often disjointed themes, they are surprisingly fun. In these titles, the theme of the game mechanics and the theme evolved hand-in-hand, often undergoing major switches half way through before settling into a successful partnership.

The Sims was a game about architecture that morphed into a game about playing dollhouse.
Grand Theft Auto was a cops and robbers chase game where you were the cop. It evolved into a game about being a free roaming criminal.
Quake was an Aztec style world where you tossed about a giant Thor-like hammer. It evolved into a nameless soldier battling against the mutants in a series of brown dungeons.
Bioshock was originally about Nazi's on an island.

If you start to dig into how game generate 'fun', many of these thematic transformations are, if not inveitable, certainly commonplace. It turns out that most game designers are not complete idiots when it comes to integrating theme and setting into their game designs. Designers aren't ignoring theme. They are simply using theme in a manner appropriate to the medium in which they work.

Some logic behind the madness
If you look at games as being about exploratory learning, they tend to teach the player a series of skills. First the player learns basic skills (how to press a button) and overtime assemble a scaffold of skills that lets them engage in more complex scenarios like 'save the princess'. Each moment of learning gives a burst of pleasure.

These basic skills are utilized over and over again. If the player fails to learn them, the rest of the game is lost on them. Games reward involvement, yet there is a high cost the player must pay in terms of initial learning necessary to become involved.

"Theme" from this perspective, is shorthand for a collection of preexisting mental tools, skills and mental models. I think of it as a tool chest of chunked behaviors that the designer can rely upon to smooth out the initial learning curve.

The theme you select directly influences how you present your initial skills to the user. By saying "Pirates", I turn on a particular schema in the player's brain and a network of possible behaviors and likely outcomes instantaneously lights up. If they see a pirate with an impressive sword facing a small soldier, the goal of fighting the enemy is self evident. With a small visual cue, I've eliminated minutes of painful initial learning.

There is a fascinating moment in the sequence of exploratory learning where players say to themselves "Oh, I recognize and have mastered this situation already, so let me demonstrate my excellence." Because of the triggering of the theme, the challenge appears possible and
attainable. If on the other hand, I had substituted the pirates with gray blob A and orange blob B, the player might be quite confused and not even bother to pick up the controller.

Why so few themes?
To a certain degree this perspective on games explains the limited number of themes used in games compared to books or movies. A book uses theme as a hook to get people interested in plot and character dynamics. There are lots of potential hooks and the more unique they are, the more intrigued the reader is to find out more. This encourages a proliferation of fascinating settings.

On the other hand, a good theme in a game is one that triggers a number of clear mental models that are applicable to the game mechanics at hand. If you push too far outside the experience zone of potential players, you make them feel inadequate.

It also suggests that occasionally a literary theme simply is not needed. Sometimes it is better to just tell the player, "Hey, it is a game and like any game you've played, we'll educate you as you go." The same triggering of appropriate schema occurs. If it is enough to grease the wheels of learning, then our mission as a game designer is accomplished.

"Skinning" game designs is a bad practice
When you look at game design from the 'games as learning' perspective, the idea of creating an slap-on aesthetic skin for a set of game mechanics starts to break down. In the best games, mechanics and theme evolve in lockstep over the course of the many iterations. If a mechanic isn't working, you have a couple choices. You can adjust the rules or you can adjust the feedback that the player receives. The two act in concert to produce the player's learning experience.

A good portion of the time, it makes sense to adjust the feedback side of the equation. What if people don't understand that the pirate is their character? Maybe it makes sense to make the pirate wear a right red outfit and the enemy a bit more evil looking. When you do so, the theme of the game shifts ever so slightly. Over hundreds (or thousands) of tweaks, a theme for the game might emerge that is quite different than what you originally envisioned. This is often the case for the best game in the history of our industry.

In fact, the final theme may be semi-incoherent if you attempt to analyze it as a literary work. However, that doesn't matter because it provides the moment-by-moment scaffolding of feedback that helps the player learn their way through the game. As long as the game is fun and delivers value to the customer we can often toss the literary definition of theme out the window.

In fact, you start getting into trouble when you make the theme so rigidly defined that you can't adjust the feedback for specific game mechanics. What if you are dealing with a license where the pirate isn't allowed to wear a red outfit? That design option, which may have been the best one available, is taken off the table. The hundreds of little trade offs that occur when theme coherence wins and gameplay loses diminishes the effectiveness of the game.

So you can't just 'skin' a set of game mechanics. When you do makes the attempt, a well executed iterative process of game design will often result in a game that is quite different than its source material. A poorly executed process results in a game that plays poorly.

Conclusion
There are a couple lessons here.

The most effective game themes exist primarily to facilitate the learning process for the player. This may be a traditional narrative theme, but it doesn't need to be.
Theme evolves in lock step with the rules of the game over a process of many iterations. You might as well plan for it. Early on develop vertical slices of your game. This will help you converge on working combinations of theme and rules. As you go allow for iteration on production assets.
Locking in your theme too early and too rigidly can stunt the exploration of more effective feedback systems. A bit of flexibility often yields better gameplay.

take care
Danc.

Rules of Productivity Presentation

2008-09-28T12:03:00.011-06:00

How do we get more work done? It is a question that every manager and every passionate worker faces. Yet, for the most part, teams operate on gut instinct and habit. The results are less than optimal.

Over the years I've been collecting small pieces of research on various factors that actually seem to improve productivity. I've assembled eight of these experiments into a PowerPoint presentation. Feel free to use the graphs and data within to spread these practical ideas throughout your own teams.

Topics covered include:

The idiocy of prolonged overtime
The unintuitive connection between doing more and making better products.
Ideal team sizes and work environments

These lessons are particularly applicable to the game industry since it has some of the least educated management of any group in the software industry. In general, this is not their direct fault. We simply have a culture that tends to look inward (or at the movie industry) for solutions. A broader education on management and work practices, despite its ability to dramatically improve our games, typically takes a back seat to meeting the latest arbitrary, urgent deadline.

Download the presentation here:

Rules%20of%20Productivity.pdf
Rules%20of%20Productivity.pptx (Apologies for the pptx file)

take care,
Danc.

Shade: Prototyping Challenge results

2008-08-21T08:39:00.009-06:00

It is time to give out awards to the Shade Prototyping challenge!

Every prototyping challenge I release is a grand exploration of a particular gaming system. The concept often sounds coherent on paper, but in reality it is composed of a series of small experiments involving movement, pacing, emergence and more. After every prototype, it is worth sorting through the experiments and seeing which ones are worth investing in further and which ones should be left behind.

Game design is a process, not a bolt of lightening from the blue. You build an experiment, reinvest in the things that work and try to fix the things that are broken. After iteration upon iteration, the game emerges. In this spirit, these awards are not the end of the Shade project, but instead are an opportunity to identify the next steps.

Even in these simple prototypes, Shade shows promise as a game concept. It just needs pass upon pass of polish to turn into something glorious.

Bronze awards
First, the bronze awards. These go out to the wonderful souls that made a game.

Of great interest was the fact that most people attempted 2D implementations of the concept. This makes sense considering the wide availability of 2D tools and skills on the market. Now that I have a better understanding of the dynamics of the game, I may release an updated version of the challenge in the future that includes a set of 2D graphics and a tweaked design that allows for an easier 2D implementation.

Mobeamer: http://battleforcesonline.com/shrooms.php
Lubos: http://img110.imageshack.us/img110/7751/img0001ma5.jpg
Leonardo: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/apocalyx/MushRide-lua-0.9.3.zip?download
c berube: http://www.thewasabiproject.com/shade-and-shrooms/
ben: (I'm having difficulty with this one since it keeps telling me I have a corrupt zip) http://www.myfamilyline.info/programming/Shade.zip

Silver award
We had one Silver award this time around.

The silver goes to Aras Pranckevicius for his lovely 3D implementation of Shade using Unity. I got a solid 5 minutes of fun out of his prototype and lots of ideas on what to do next. You can play it here:

http://aras-p.info/projShaduShrooms.html

Without further ado, let's get into a critique of the game as it stands now. I'll be use Aras's prototype as the baseline since it include a large number of interesting experiments in action.

Moments of genuine fun
First we'll start with the elements that were distinctly enjoyable. These are seeds that can be extended much further. You always want to try to identify these dynamics early since they can act as a focal point that guides the project. When you start cutting experiments, knowing where the core fun lies can help prioritize your culling.

1) Searching for the perfect mushroom is exciting: I had a surprisingly enjoyable time finding a good sized mushroom to take back to the drop point. Scarcity emerged as a major theme of the game. Potential improvements that can focus in on this include:

Increase the types and varieties of mushrooms. The act of finding something valuable in the scarce wilderness has all the hallmarks of a hugely addicting activity.
Create different growing cycles: Have some rare ones grow slowly or only grow quickly in the presence of other plants. If the player harvests them all at once, they are gone. This adds a resource management element to the game the reinforces the sense of scarcity and value.

2) The dynamically changing world is exciting. I didn't know where a mushroom might appear. In an early prototype, mushrooms would grow in the shadow of other mushrooms. The fact that the world was living and growing was immensely satisfying.

Implement Munchers and Bushes: These will add immensely to the gameplay by creating a dynamic ecosystem.
AI Seed transporters: Add simple AI driven characters that pick up seeds and move them to new locations will very quickly create amazing patterns. For example, one type of seed transporter might move small mushrooms 2 feet away from any other mushroom. Another might move seeds into the shadow of a smaller object. These simple rules will create all sorts of interesting patterns.
Vary the sizes of elements: Have some objects the grow very large. These will dynamically change the landscape over time and in turn create a wildly varying shadowscape.
Add more elements that grow in the shadows: The patterns that came about from mushrooms growing in the shadow of mushrooms was one of the more interesting emergent properties of the simulation. It was cool! Combined with a moving sun, all sorts of interesting hedges should pop up.

Moments of potential fun
The following elements were intellectually interesting, but didn't quite leave me as entertained as I was hoping. This is quite common and just means that you need to invest a little further in the idea.

3) Jumping from shadow to shadow: It was interesting picking my way back through the 'shadowscape' of the level. A journey back to home base where I needed to precisely plan my movements gave the mushroom hunting experience a nice tension. However, in the prototype level there were a lot of sunlit areas and relatively small obstacles. As such the decisions made on the return journey weren't that interesting. Some improvements

Bigger, more maze like obstacles: I notice that when I'm walking around outside, I often have to make a distinct choice: should I got left around a large building sitting in my path or right? I rarely remember the future shadow terrain on each side of the building so I end up making a short term decision to reach the easiest shade. This often hurts me in the long run.

By adding bigger obstacles that take time to navigate and that block off other options, the player is asked to make movement decisions that have a cost. In the best of worlds, players will find themselves jumping from shadow to shadow only to end up further and further from their goal. Some will heroically find their way back. Others will remember their failure and carefully plot out the terrain the next time around. Either way, it creates more meaningful decisions.
More contiguous areas of shadow: Taller objects would help as would objects that are skinny at the base and bulbous on top like trees. The amount of shadows is something you'll need to balance for.
Hungry monsters: The tension can be ramped up by including shambling monsters that move towards you when you have a mushroom in tow. Normally, they can be quite docile and may not even move. But as soon as you get a mushroom, they turn red and make their way towards you. One touch and your mushroom loses extra power. This adds some tactical and time-based pressure to your shadow picking steps.

4) Mini Map
The minimap solves an important problem: How do I find my way back home. However, it also removes a bit of the tension that comes from wandering and finding new paths.

Use a beacon system instead: Instead of a mini-map, a directional highlight like the ones used in Shadow of the Colossus or Knytt would do the trick quite nicely. A little glow at the edge of the screen or a compass that always points towards home help orient the player, but don't give away the terrain.

Things that didn't quite pan out
The following are things that didn't quite work and I don't see useful ways of making them a key part of the experience.

5) Gathering long strings of mushrooms: Once you start gathering long strings of mushrooms it becomes hard to keep them out of the sunlight. I noticed that as soon as I gathered more than one mushroom, I would simply zip to the goal as fast as humanly possible and ignore all tactical decisions. This is an example of a fun idea that actually reduces the complexity of the rest of the game.

Conclusion
The prototyping challenge doesn't really end until someone creates a game worthy of a gold award. So far gold is still within reach. There are some extremely promising mechanics at play in the shade prototype and I'm open to discussing and iterating on further tweaks if anyone wants to take the design further. Feel free to post to this thread if you come up with something cool. Who is going to grab the first ever gold award in Lost Garden history?

For inspiration, I leave you with this simple game that also uses some of the growing ecosystem elements we see hints of in successful Shade prototypes. It was built in 48 hours and easily has more than 15 minutes of game play. If this fellow can find hours of fun in a short prototyping exercise, I'm convinced that you can take your existing Shade prototypes and turn them into something wonderful.

Breaking the Tower: http://www.mojang.com/notch/ld12/breaking/

Best wishes,
Danc.

Soul Bubbles: A classic game ill treated by expert reviewers

2008-07-08T00:12:00.012-06:00

I wanted to turn your attention to a delightful little title called Soul Bubbles. I had a chance to play an early version of the game and was impressed by its lead designer, Olivier Lejade, careful attention to the difficulty level of the game.

When it finally launched, I was intrigued to see its aggregate reviewer score hovering at 77%. That is a middling score, but I expected better. Yet when I glanced at the user rating, it was pegged at an impressive 92%. From the user's perspective, we are talking about an instant classic, with a higher aggregate user ratings than either press favorites Halo 2 (91%) or Halo 3 (89%).

Why the disparity? When I looked closer, the professional reviews with lower scores almost all commented on the difficulty level, the one area I knew for a fact that the developers spent months polishing. Alex Sassoon Coby over at Gamespot intones ominously,"The shallow difficulty curve and lack of challenge in the main goals are the only things that let Soul Bubbles down."

Yet, users have the opposite reaction to the same exact features. One fellow gushes "It's very easy to get into thanks to the excellent tutorials, which introduce you effortlessly to the physics-based gameplay as you go along. The game's 40 levels will keep you busy for some time, but chances are you'll play the missions back to back only to be left craving for more!"

There's something odd happening here. Is Soul Bubbles a simplistic, middle of the road experience or is it a classic new game that deserves to be promoted as one of the more playable and innovative games of the year?

The answer tells us a lot about what it takes to make a great game and also happens to highlight one of the grand philosophical flaws in modern game criticism.

Games are about learning skills
First, a bit of background. Games, particularly one built around exploring innovative new game systems like Soul Bubbles, are all about learning new skills. There is a lot written on the topic, there are some articles at the end of this essay for you to peruse. The short of it is that learning new skills yields fun.

You can think of a game like Soul Bubbles as a bit sheet of bubble wrap. Each challenge is a little bubble of fun waiting to be popped. Most games are like this. However, once you've learned a particular challenge, doing it again is usually less exciting. By playing, you've been changed. You've learned the challenge and you'll never be able to revisit that challenge and relive the same emotion that you felt the first time through. You can't re-pop the bubble.

People who play a large number of games tend to rapidly morph into expert gamers. Reviewers, specifically, are almost by definition experts. In order to multiply their meager paychecks, they train themselves to quickly plow through dozens of games. They've crunched through so many levels, powerups, puzzles and collectibles that they are walking encyclopedias of game design techniques.

Since the act of learning is where a large amount of single player fun arises from, many expert gamers find it more and more difficult to derive pleasure from each new title. Games often reuse mechanics and the even an innovative game like Soul Bubbles starts feeling the same. It's like handing the reviewer a sheet of bubble wrap with all the bubbles already popped.

The result is that an initial game activity, such as a tutorial, that would delight a new user instead appear at rote obstacles that need to be skipped past as quickly as possible. Reviewers will use their impressive pre-existing mastery to zip past carefully constructed levels in the hope of find a challenge that will teach them something new. For most, this is subconscious behavior. They just know that they are looking for the thrill that they once experienced as child playing games for the first time. Due to the fact that they have changed, that they are now experts, only the most refined and challenging games still give them a hint of that sweet learning delight. Everything else is labeled 'crap.'

The Expertise Bias
This phenomenon is well understood in the game development community. Game developers also suffer from being experts. Not only do they have encyclopedic knowledge of exist game mechanics, they also have an intimate understanding of how their game is supposed to operate. Surely with such vast expertise, they would be the ideal critics.

Yet, because games are a learning activity, expert game developers often have surprising difficulty understanding how new users will react to their creation. Things they feel are incredibly important end up not mattering. Elements they dismiss as trivial annoyances end up stopping players dead in their tracks. The very fact that designer knows their game intimately makes them a poor critic.

Observation is the solution
The well documented work around for the expertise bias is to observe other people, who aren't experts, play the game. The best designers follow a simple process:

Observe target players
Take notes on potential issues.
Leverage their intimate knowledge of the game to come up with elegant solutions.

Valve does it, Nintendo does it, Microsoft does it. Admittedly, the process is time consuming and not always the easiest path. However, testing with real users is the only proven way to accurately ascertain a game's difficulty and balance.

By observing real people in your target audience learning for the first time, you can realign your heavily biased perception of the game to be more in sync with reality. It becomes readily apparent that 'obvious decisions' do in fact need improved tutorials. Entire systems that you thought were essential are often ignored as players telegraph their delight in simple things like picking up shiny coins.

Game developers have learned the hard way what happens when you ignore the practice of observation. Periodically, schedules become tight and the expensive act of observing real users ends up on the chopping block. Someone with more ego than wisdom stands up and proclaims that they can use their infinite expertise to balance the game using brain power alone. Inevitably their products suffer.

They are fighting the fundamental physics of our medium. Experts, in the absence of observation, make for heavily biased critics.

A tale of Soul Bubbles
Mekensleep, the developers of Soul Bubble, are enlightened developers. They spent months polishing and balancing the difficulty of their game. They held playtests, they observed real users playing for the first time and they fixed the problems that they ran into. They knew that that Soul Bubbles featured some very unique movement and herding mechanics, so they were under no assumptions that they could use their expertise to predict a user's initial reactions.

In the process they learned a lot about how their customers wanted to play Soul Bubbles. Their target player picks up a few games a year and plays in short burst for a long period of time. Many are not looking for intense competition or a massive challenge. Instead, they want a way to relax and explore a delightful world.

As a result Soul Bubbles targets exploratory and easy fun play styles. These feel very different than the traditional hard fun that is the mainstay of many titles played by the core. Yet they are equally enjoyable and often more profitable. Much of the game is about peacefully exploring with the levels designed so that around every corners there is something new to learn or play with.

Through a rigorous and iterative process that involved going to real users, they nailed the difficulty level. That is why the aggregate user ratings are up at 92%.

The flaw of expert reviewers
The reviewers of Soul Bubbles didn't observe real users. Instead, they reacted to the game as expert gamers. The tutorials were a bore, the game could be 'beat' in a short amount of time and the number of times they were forced restart were low. So reviewers told their audience that they should not buy the game on the assumption that the player would likely feel the same thing that the reviewer felt. This represents a basic philosophical approach to game criticism.

I read a short essay by Andrew Doull that sums up this philosophy with the gem of a quote "Fundamentally, the process of being a game critic is the same as being a game designer (is the same as being a game player). That is, it involves the exploration of a possible game space, and trying to validate whether that game space is interesting."

To me, this represents a fallacy of epic proportions that results in badly designed games and inaccurate reviews.

Due to the fact that games are learning systems, good game critique requires two elements.

An expert understanding of the game: Playing the game, knowing mechanics, player psychology, design patterns gives the critic powerful tools for understanding and reacting to what they are witnessing.
Observation of representative users: Expert knowledge biases the priorities of most players, so it is critical to see how real users react to a title in order to get actual target audience data. Having sat through hundreds of hours of observing users, you don't actually know how the virgin value of an inactive system until you see others use it.

Game reviewers only follow one half of this unified process. Since most reviews eschew observation of others (often for timeliness), there is nothing to counter balance their expert bias.

Games are not movies. Please repeat...again and again and again.
There are good historical reasons why experts fail to incorporate player observation into their game reviews. The concept of a review comes from reviewing movies, books and plays. These are what I think of as 'empathetic media'. The process of enjoying these works follows a clear psychological pathway.

The viewer observes a universal stimuli, such as a pretty girl in a movie,
They empathize with her situation based off their extensive memories of related situations
Finally they recall and synthesize an emotional response.

The best works of linear media deal with broadly identifiable stimuli, archetypes of human experiences. Most people have experience with loneliness or the boy winning the lovely girl. Empathetic media gains its mass appeal by dealing in universal truths.

When a reviewer watches a movie, they are asking themselves the question "Do I, as a passable representative of humanity, react strongly to the stimuli in this movie? If so, there is a great chance that others will as well." There is very little expertise bias involved in this exercise. It asks the reviewer to empathize with the stimuli like any other person would.

There is a big question if games work well as empathic media. Their stories are weak, characters flimsy and their exploration of universal truths are usually laughable. Instead, games tend to be strongest when they focus on learning, exploration and first time experiences. Games, more than any other media, are less about reacting and more about changing who we are.

Because the deep, underlying theme of games is change and learning, you need to take into account your level of mastery and the level of mastery of the target audience in your criticism. Otherwise, you end up, like in the case of Soul Bubbles, being the PhD student claiming that Physics 101 is a waste of time because you've 'been and done that' already.

Traditional reviewing techniques taken from the world of empathic media are ill suited for critiquing games. They lack the essential observational techniques that working game designers have found to be so important.

Looking into the future
So, yes, the current game reviewing system is broken. As is often the case with games, we've adopted wholesale the techniques of movies and literature without asking if they even make sense in the context of our brilliantly vibrant new media. I'm certainly not the first to say this.

Yet with single player games, the hack still almost works. Single player games have generally followed a linear path padded with cutscenes, where a reviewer will typically have a similar experience to that of most other players. As such, the expertise bias usually only throws off scores by 10 to 20%. Long term, this practice shrinks the gaming community and it has certainly caused a few developers to miss out on royalty bonuses, but overall it clunks along.

Yet, the world is changing once more. As you introduce multiplayer games into the mix, social dynamics take over and who you play with has as much impact on the experience as which quests you take on. The types of learning and the experiential paths that each player takes are exploding. One player's experience playing with his new girlfriend will be radically different than that of a old school guild settling into the game as a respite from World of Warcraft. An empathetic expert reviewer will not be able to speak for everyone in a convincing fashion.

It is again instructive to observe how developers are using an observation-based understanding of the game to create a proper practice of game criticism. Right now there are hundreds of teams building complex metrics and logging systems that track their player's experiences on a minute level of detail. The best have psychographic and business dashboards that tell them how people are reacting and where problems are emerging. In the future, developers will be observing, tracking and improving the experience of individual guilds and social groups. Practical game criticism, the sort performed by actual game design teams, will be even futher fueled by deep observation and timely intervention.

Unfortunately, these tools are not available to most reviewers. In the coming years, developers will have a vastly superior understanding of how customers are reacting to their game than reviewers will. This is already the case for many titles, such as Soul Bubbles, and the trend will only continue.

What is the future role of professional reviewers?
What role does the expert reviewer have in this situation? As the audience for games broaden, as the benefits of a single expert judging an entire game diminish as their opinions become even more divorced from the actual experiences of real players. The air of objectivity dissipates and the reviewer becomes no more than yet another guy with an intricately detailed, heavily biased opinion.

This represents an intriguing crisis in game criticism. There are many paths for the ex-reviewer to wander down:

The news announcements: The factual (though still flavorful) announcements of new games, events and updates. The goals is to let people know that something is happening.
The analysts: The elitist community that uses their expertise to deconstruct games according to various theoretical frameworks. The goal is a deeper philosophical understanding of games (and strutting rights within their small incestuous circle.) This is my world. :-)
The tourists: Every Man players who approach writing about a game like a travel journalist on a safari. The goal is to evoke the emotions that the individual reporter experienced, not to predict what everyone's experience might be. They succeed if they provide simple entertainment.
The opinion mavens: The high energy personality who crystalize the trends and fashions of their target culture. The goal is to pick hits in a heavily biased but entertaining fashion and enhance the maven's personal brand.
Ranking sites: Sites like gamerankings are still of questionable value, but over time sites that use a broader range of data will emerge. The goal is to provide a public thermometer that, with reasonable accuracy, states if the game is worth trying.

I already see this evolution occurring. I've given up on reading reviews and instead find myself frequenting gaming blogs, the news portals of our age. Many traditional reviewers are popping up in more experientially-focused sites like The Escapist or Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Even next generation ranking sites are appearing in the form of portals like Kongregate. And what is Zero Punctuation if not our very own flavorful equivalent of Oprah the Opinion Maven?

Closing thoughts
Go out and try Soul Bubbles. It is a great example of what happens when a developer balances their title for their target audience and not the expert reviewer. If you are an expert reviewer, play it with an eye towards seeing how a first time user might experience it. It is an interesting and remarkably difficult exercise. Then give the game to someone who isn't an expert gamer and watch them play it. I suspect that they'll highlight elements that you didn't even realize were important.

If you are serious about providing objective insight into a game, either a title you are building or one your are reviewing, your expertise is not enough. In fact, your vast mastery of game related skills is mostly likely causing a giant bias in your judgments. You need to fight this bias by observing other players over and over again. They will do things with the game that are a source of wondrous insight. Your expertise becomes a tool for making great changes based off these insights, not one for predicting a priori exactly how all users will react to the game.

As for the current review industry, it is built on the unstable foundation of expert opinion in the absence of actual player observation. As games evolve and become ever more about first time learning experiences, the traditional game review will become increasingly irrelevant. It is arguable that they've already stopped informing most buying decisions and now serve as little more than entertainment for the hardcore niche. As the value proposition of reviews falter, the vast, churning, capitalist forces of creative destruction will replace them with a much richer set of game criticism that offers real value to its readers.

It's a beautiful day outside, so I'm off to pop a bit more bubble wrap,
Danc.

References

Soul Bubbles: http://www.soulbubblesgame.com/
Games as learning: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1524/the_chemistry_of_game_design.php?print=1
Hard and easy fun: http://www.xeodesign.com/whyweplaygames/xeodesign_whyweplaygames.pdf